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K – Habeas ViscusKThe 1AC is built on a fantasy of incorporation that aims to include people into the University. This creates a notion of personhood as property that ensures a necessary outside – who is human enough to speak up and be heard versus those whose sounds cannot articulate the language of humanity. What is necessary is a disarticulation of the human organism through an affirmation of the liminal spaces of not-quite-humans.Weheliye 14 Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, 2014, “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human,”We are in dire need of alternatives to the legal conception of personhood that dominates our world, and, in addition, to not lose sight of what remains outside the law, what the law cannot capture, what it cannot magically transform into the fantastic form of property ownership. Writing about the connections between transgender politics and other forms of identity- based activism that respond to structural inequalities, legal scholar Dean Spade shows how the focus on inclusion, recognition, and equality based on a narrow legal framework (especially as it pertains to antidiscrimination and hate crime laws) not only hinders the eradication of violence against trans people and other vulnerable populations but actually creates the condition of possibility for the continued unequal “distribution of life chances.”22 If demanding recognition and inclusion remains at the center of minority politics, it will lead only to a delimited notion of personhood as property that zeroes in comparatively on only one form of subjugation at the expense of others, thus allowing for the continued existence of hierarchical differences between full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This can be gleaned from the “successes” of the mainstream feminist, civil rights, and lesbian-gay rights movements, which facilitate the incorporate[ed]ion of a privileged minority into the ethnoclass of Man at the cost of the still and/or newly criminalized and disposable populations (women of color, the black poor, trans people, the incarcerated, etc.).23 To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the [PIC] prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintain[s]ing the racializing assemblages in the world of Man. Instead of appealing to legal recognition, Julia Oparah suggests counteracting the “racialized (trans)gender entrapment” within the [PIC] prison-industrial complex and beyond with practices of “maroon abolition” (in reference to the long history of escaped slave contraband settlements in the Americas) to “foreground the ways in which often overlooked African diasporic cultural and political legacies inform and undergird anti- prison work,” while also providing strategies and life worlds not exclusively centered on reforming the law.24 Relatedly, Spade calls for a radical politics articulated from the “‘impossible’ worldview of trans political existence,” which redefines “the insistence of government agencies, social service providers, media, and many nontrans activists and nonprofiteers that the existence of trans people is impossible.”25 A relational maroon abolitionism beholden to the practices of black radicalism and that arises from the incompatibility of black trans existence with the world of Man serves as one example of how putatively abject modes of being need not be redeployed within hegemonic frameworks but can be operationalized as variable liminal territories or articulated assemblages in movements to abolish the grounds upon which all forms of subjugation are administered.Freedom of speech reinforces linguistic structures that naturalize the European Man – The paradigm of incorporation of the body excludes the language of the flesh whose “cries and groans” are inaudible to the world of the Man. Weheliye 2 Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, 2014, “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human,”In this closing chapter I would like to continue taking up Hortense Spillers's challenge and ask what it might mean to claim the monstrosity of the flesh as a site for freedom beyond the world of Man in order to heed Baby Suggs's words in Toni Morrison's Beloved about loving the flesh: “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.” 1 In order to improperly inhabit and understand the politics and poetics of habeas viscus, we must return to some of the voices from the previous two chapters. Revisit them we should, however, not to authenticate them as acoustic mirrors of the oppressed or to grant them juridical humanity but in order to listen more closely to prophetic traces of the hieroglyphics of the flesh in these echoes of the future anterior tense. Many critics assume that political violence is somehow outside the grasp of linguistic structures. In her now classic account of the body in pain, Scarry argues that pain in general and torture in particular causes a regression to the “pre-language of cries and groans,” which becomes indicative of the annihilation of the tortured's world. 2 In making this argument, Scarry assumes that world and language preexist and are unmade by the act of torture, which imagines political violence as exterior to the normal order rather than as an instrument in the creation of the world and language of Man. Agamben's point about language and witnessing vis-à-vis Auschwitz, although not quite in the same register, skirts fairly close to making a similar argument: “It is thus necessary that the impossibility of bearing witness, the ‘lacuna,’ that constitutes human language, collapses, giving way to a different impossibility of bearing witness— that which does not have language” (Remnants, 39). Perhaps it might be more useful to construe “cries and groans,” “heart-rending shrieks,” “the mechanical murmurs without content” as language that does not rely on linguistic structures, at least not primarily, to convey meaning, sense, or expression. 3 For language, especially in the space-ways of the flesh, comes in many varieties, and functions not only—or even primarily—to create words in the service of conforming to linguistic structures transparent in the world of Man. 4 This approach also cannot imagine that for many of those held captive by Man it is always already “after the end of the world…. Don't you know that yet?” long before the actual acts of torture have begun. Roman Grzyb, a former concentration camp prisoner, for instance, gives the following account of the Muselmann's idiolect: “The Muselmann used his very own jargon by constantly repeating what came to his completely confused mind. The sentences were often incomplete and were illogical, stopping abruptly at random points.” 5 As can be gleaned from the testimonies of Muselm?nner, slaves, or Ellis Island detainees, what is at stake is not so much the lack of language per se, since we have known for a while now that the subaltern cannot speak, but the kinds of dialects available to the subjected and how these are seen and heard by those who bear witness to their plight. Nevertheless, the suffering voices exemplified by James and the Muselm?nner should not be understood as fountains of authenticity but rather as instantiations of a radically different political imaginary that steers clear of reducing the subjectivity of the oppressed to bare life. In R. Radhakrishnan's thinking, this political domain produces “critical knowledge, which in turn empowers the voice of suffering to make its own cognitiveepistemological intervention by envisioning its own utopia, rather than accepting an assigned position within the ameliotary schemes proposed by the dominant discourse.” 6 Thus, suffering appears as utopian erudition—or is expressed through hieroglyphics of the flesh to echo Spillers and Zora Neale Hurston—and not as an end unto itself or as a precritical sphere of truth, as the liberal humanist Weltanschauung would have it; rather, “liberalism is tolerant of abundant speech as long as it does not have to take into account voices it does not understand.” 7 Where dominant discourse seeks to develop upgrades of the current notions of humanity as Man, improvements are not the aim or product of the imaginaries borne of racializing assemblages and political violence; instead they summon forms of human emancipation that can be imagined but not (yet) described. While this form of communication does not necessarily conform to the standard definition of linguistic utterance, to hear Aunt Hester's howls or the Muselmann's repetition merely as pre- or nonlanguage absolves the world of Man from any and all responsibility for bearing witness to the flesh. Hardly anterior to language and therefore the human, these rumblings vocalize the humming relay of the world that makes linguistic structures possible, directly corresponding to how the not-quite- and nonhuman give rise to the universe of Man. That is to say, the flesh engulfs not only Man's visually marked others via instruments of torture and the intergenerational transmission of hieroglyphics but emanates rays of potential enfleshment throughout the far-flung corners of Being in the world of Man. According to Aristotle, even though “higher life (bios) is emphatically the end proposed, yet life itself (zoe) is also an object for which [citizens] unite and maintain the corporate political association; for it is probable that some degree of the higher life is necessarily implied in merely living…. Certain it is that the majority of men endure much suffering without ceasing to cling to life—a proof that a certain happiness or natural sweetness resides in it.” 8 When the hieroglyphics of the flesh are construed not merely as banishments but as transit visas to universes betwixt and between the jurisdictions of Man, they prompt the following question: how is it possible to politicize the “natural sweetness” of the flesh without the limits imposed by the concepts of bare life and biopolitics?This figures into the production of “Man” as racializing assemblage – blackness is positioned simultaneously inside and outside Man which creates the conditions for the emergence of the sociogenetic demarcation between human and not-quite-human – instead, we should foreground the deconstruction of Man as a category – thus the role of the ballot is to deconstruct the European Man.Weheliye 3 Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, 2014, “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human,”Wynter’s large-scale intellectual project, which she has been pursuing in one form or another for the last thirty years, disentangles Man from the human in order to use the space of subjects placed beyond the grasp of this domain as a vital point from which to invent hitherto unavailable genres of the human. 27 According to this scheme in western modernity the religious conception of the self gave way to two modes of secularized being: first, the Cartesian “Rational Man,” or homo politicus, and then beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, “Man as a selected being and natural organism . . . as the universal human, ‘man as man.’” 28 The move from a supernatural conception of world and the self’s place within this cosmos, however, does not signal the supersession of a primitive axiomatic with an enlightened and rarefied type of the human. Rather, one genre of the human (Judeo-Christian, religious) yields to another, just as provincial, version of the human, and, although both claim universality, neither genre fully represents the multiplicity of human life forms. In the context of the secular human, black subjects, along with indigenous populations, the colonized, the insane [cognitively disabled], the poor, the disabled, and so on serve as limit cases by which Man can demarcate himself as the universal human. 29 Thus, race, rather than representing accessory, comes to define the very essence of the modern human as “the code through which one not simply knows what human being is, but experiences being.” 30 Accordingly, race makes its mark in the dominion of the ideological and physiological, or rather race scripts the elision of the former with the latter in the flesh. In her latest writings, Wynter identifies homo politicus’s successor in the long road from “theodicy” to “biodicy” as the liberal “bio-economic man.” 31 The idea of “bio-economic man” marks the assumed naturalness that positions economic inequities, white supremacy, genocide, economic exploitation, gendered subjugation, colonialism, “natural selection,” and concepts such as the free market not in the realm of divine design, as in previous religious orders of things, but beyond the reach of human intervention all the same. In both cases, this ensures that a particular humanly devised model of humanity remains isomorphic with the Homo sapiens species. Wynter’s approach differs markedly from arguments that seek to include the oppressed within the already existing strictures of liberal humanism or, conversely, abolish humanism because of its racio-colonial baggage; instead Wynter views black studies and minority discourse as liminal spaces, simultaneously ensconced in and outside the world of Man, from which to construct new objects of knowledge and launch the reinvention of the human at the juncture of the culture and biology feedback loop. Even though the genre of the human we currently inhabit in the west is intimately tied to the somatic order of things, for Wynter, the human cannot be understood in purely biological terms, whether this applies to the history of an individual organism (ontogenesis) or the development at the level of a species (phylogeny). This is where Fanon’s important concept of sociogeny comes into play, offering Wynter an approach of thinking of the human— the “science in the social text,” to echo Spillers’s phrase— where culture and biology are not only not opposed to each other but in which their chemistry discharges mutually beneficial insights. 32 In this scenario, a symbolic register, consisting of discourse, language, culture, and so on (sociogeny) always already accompanies the genetic dimension of human action (ontogeny), and it is only in the imbrication of these two registers that we can understand the full scope of our being-in-the-world. Fanon’s concept of sociogeny, arising from the inadequacy of traditional psycho?analytic models in the analysis of racialized colonialism, builds on Freud’s appropriation of recapitulation theory. 33 Thus, according to Fanon, Freud breaks with the strict codes of Darwinism and social Darwinism (phylogenetic theory) in order to analyze the psyche of the modern individualized subject from an ontogenetic vantage point. While the ontogenetic technique yields, depending on your general sympathy for the now very antiquated protocols of Freudian psychoanalysis, abundant results when evaluating white subjects ensconced in the liberal nuclear family, it encounters a roadblock when transplanted to the colonial settlement, which is why “the alienation of the black man [black people] is not an individual question. Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny. . . . Society, unlike biochemical processes, does not escape human influence. Man is what brings society into being.” 34 Why does the colonial situation specifically necessitate a reformulation of Freud’s and Darwinism’s procedural frame of reference? Since colonial policies and discourse are frequently grounded in racial distinctions, the colonized subject cannot experience her or his nonbeing outside the particular ideology of western Man as synonymous with human, or, as Fanon writes, “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” 35 The colonial encounter determines not just the black colonial subject’s familial structure or social and physical mobility and such, but colors his or her very being as he-or-she-which-is-not-quite-human, as always already tardy in the rigged match of the survival of the fittest. Conversely, in this ontological face-off, the white colonial subject encounters herself or himself as the “fullness and genericity of being human.” However, he or she only does so in relation to the deficiency of the black subject and indigenous (Wynter, 40). To be precise, Fanon and Wynter locate racializing assemblages in the domain of being rather than the realm of epiphenomena, showing how humans create race for the benefit of some and the detriment of other humans. Yet because race is thought to rest in biology, it necessitates different analytic protocols than bare life and bio? politics, namely ones that draw on both ontogeny and sociogeny. Whereas Fanon’s mobilization of ontogeny remains rooted in the Freudian paradigm as pertaining to the individual subject, Wynter summons the explanatory apparatus of neurobiology to elucidate how racialization, despite its origins in sociogeny, is converted to the stuff of ontogenesis; this is what Wynter refers to as “sociogenetic.” 36 Although human life has a biochemical core defined by a species-specific adaptive reward and punishment mechanism (poison = bad and food = good) that “determines the way in which each organism will perceive, classify, and categorize the world,” it is “only through the mediation of the organism’s experience of what feels good to the organism and what feels bad to it, and thereby of what it feels like to be that organism” that a repertoire of behaviors, which ensure the continued existence of the species, develops (Wynter, 50). For the human species, because it is defined by both organic and symbolic registers, this is complicated by the way culturally specific sociogenic principles such as what is good or bad work to trigger neurochemical reward and punishment processes, in the process “institut[ing] the human subject as a culture-specific and thereby verbally defined, if physiologically implemented, mode of being and sense of self. One, therefore, whose phenomenology . . . is as objectively, constructed as its physiology” (Wynter, 54). 37 Phenomenological perception must consequently don the extravagant drag of physiology in order to “turn theory into flesh, . . . [into] codings in the nervous system,” so as to signal the extrahuman instantiation of humanity. 38 Wynter’s description of the autopoiesis of the human stretches Fanon’s concept of sociogeny by grounding it in an, albeit false or artificial, physiological reality. In other words, Wynter summons neurobiology not in order to take refuge in a prelapsarian field anterior to the registers of culture and ideology, but to provide a transdisciplinary global approach to the study of human life that explains how sociogenic phenomena, particularly race, become anchored in the ontogenic flesh. Also, in contrast to treatments of racialization more squarely articulated from the disciplinary perspective of sociobiology, Wynter does not focus on the origins and adaptive evolution of race itself but rather on how sociogenic principles are anchored in the human neurochemical system, thus counteracting sociobiological explanations of race, which retrospectively project racial categories onto an evolutionary screen. 39 That is to say, Wynter interrogates the ontogenic functioning of race— the ways it serves as a physiologically resonant nominal and conceptual pseudonym for the specific genre of the human: Man— and not its role in human phylogeny. Consequently, racialization figures as a master code within the genre of the human represented by western Man, because its law-like operations are yoked to species-sustaining physiological mechanisms in the form of a global color line— instituted by cultural laws so as to register in human neural networks— that clearly distinguishes the good/life/fully-human from the bad/death/not-quite-human. This, in turn, authorizes the conflation of racialization with mere biological life, which, on the one hand, enables white subjects to “see” themselves as transcending racialization due to their full embodiment of this particular genre of the human while responding antipathetically to nonwhite subjects as bearers of ontological cum biological lack, and, on the other hand, in those subjects on the other side of the color line, it creates sociogenically instituted physiological reactions against their own existence and reality. 40 Since the being of nonwhite subjects has been coded by the cultural laws in the world of Man as pure negativity, their subjectivity impresses punishment on the neurochemical reward system of all humans, or in the words of Frantz Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter’s day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.” 41 Political violence plays a crucial part in the baroque techniques of modern humanity, since it simultaneously serves to create not-quite-humans in specific acts of violence and supplies the symbolic source material for racialization. For Wynter, the promise of black studies— and the numerous other ruptures precipitated by the 1960s— lies in its liminality, which contains potential exit strategies from the world of Man. However, we must first devise new objects of knowledge that facilitate “the calling in question of our present culture’s purely biological definition of what it is to be , and therefore of what it is like to be, human.” 42 We must do so because we cannot fully understand the present incarnation of the human from within the “biocentric and bourgeois” epistemic order that authorizes the biological selectedness of Man and, conversely, the creat[es]ion of “dysgenic humans” (those who are evolutionarily dysselected), “a category comprised in the US of blacks, Latino[/a]s, Indians as well as the transracial group of the poor, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated,” the disabled, and the transgendered. 43 Within our current episteme, these groups are constituted as aberrations from the ethnoclass of Man by being subjected to racializing assemblages that establish “natural” differences between the selected and dysselected. In other words, black, Latino, poor, incarcerated, indigenous, and so forth populations become real objects via the conduit of evolutionarily justified discourses and institutions, which, as a consequence, authorizes Man to view himself as naturally ordained to inhabit the space of full humanity. Thus, even though racializing assemblages commonly rely on phenotypical differences, their primary function is to create and maintain distinctions between different members of the Homo sapiens species that lend a suprahuman explanatory ground (religious or biological, for example) to these hierarchies. As Wynter explains, “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources . . . —these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.” 44 Wynter’s oeuvre facilitates the analysis of the relay between different forms of subjugation, because in it the human operates as a relational ontological totality. Therefore, the Man versus Human battle does not dialectically sublate the specificity of the other struggles but articulates them in this open totality so as to abolish Man and liberate all of humanity rather than specific groups.We affirm Habeas Viscus, a relational assemblage which transforms the hieroglyphics of the flesh into a line of flight, a new type of freedom which can interrupt racializing assemblages – whereas dialectically opposing the world of Man only naturalizes its inevitability, our affirmation of freedom instantiates new genres of humanity. Weheliye 4 Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, 2014, “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human,”Because black cultures have frequently not had access to Man’s language, world, future, or humanity, black studies has developed a set of assemblages through which to perceive and understand a world in which subjection is but one path to humanity, neither its exception nor its idealized sole feature. Yet black studies, if it is to remain critical and oppositional, cannot fall prey to juridical humanity and its concomitant pitfalls, since this only affects change in the domain of the map but not the territory. In order to do so, the hieroglyphics of the flesh should not be conceptualized as just exceptional or radically particular, since this habitually leads to the comparative tabulation of different systems of oppression that then serve as the basis for defining personhood as possession. As Frantz Fanon states: “All forms of exploitation are identical, since they apply to the same ‘object’: man.” 28 Accordingly, humans are exploited as part of the Homo sapiens species for the benefit of other humans, which at the same time yields a surplus version of the human: Man. Man represents the western configuration of the human as synonymous with the heteromasculine, white, propertied, and liberal subject that renders all those who do not conform to these characteristics as [are] exploitable nonhumans, literal legal no-bodies. If we are to affect significant systemic changes, then we must locate at least some of the struggles for justice in the region of humanity as a relational ontological totality (an object of knowledge) that cannot be reduced to either the universal or particular. According to Wynter, this process requires us to recognize the “emancipation from the psychic dictates of our present . . . genre of being human and therefore from ‘the unbearable wrongness of being,’ of desetre, which it imposes upon . . . all non-white peoples, as an imperative function of its enactment as such a mode of being[;] this emancipation had been effected at the level of the map rather than at the level of the territory.” 29 The level of the map encompasses the nominal inclusion of nonwhite subjects in the false universality of western humanity in the wake of radical movements of the 1960s, while the territory Wynter invokes in this context, and in all of her work, is the figure of Man as a racializing assemblage. Wielding this very particular and historically malleable classification is not an uncritical reiteration of the humanist episteme or an insistence on the exceptional particularity of black humanity. Rather, Afro-diasporic cultures provide singular, mutable, and contingent figurations of the human, and thus do not represent mere bids for inclusion in or critiques of the shortcomings of western liberal humanism. The problematic of humanity, however, needs to be highlighted as one of the prime objects of knowledge of black studies, since not doing so will sustain the structures, discourses, and institutions that detain black life and thought within the strictures of particularity so as to facilitate the violent conflation of Man and the human. Otherwise, the general theory of how humanity has been lived, conceptualized, shrieked, hungered into being, and imagined by those subjects violently barred from this domain and touched by the hieroglyphics of the flesh will sink back into the deafening ocean of prelinguistic particularity. This, in turn, will also render apparent that black studies, especially as it is imagined by thinkers such as Spillers and Wynter, is engaged in engendering forms of the human vital to understanding not only black cultures but past, present, and future humanities. As a demonic island, black studies lifts the fog that shrouds the laws of comparison, particularity, and exception to reveal an aquatic outlook “far away from the continent of man.” 30 The poetics and politics that I have been discussing under the heading of habeas viscus or the flesh are concerned not with inclusion in reigning precincts of the status quo but, in Cedric Robinson’s apt phrasing, “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve [and I would add also to reimagine] the collective being, the ontological totality.” 31 Though the laws of Man place the flesh outside the ferocious and ravenous perimeters of the legal body, habeas viscus defies domestication both on the basis of particularized personhood as a result of suffering, as in human rights discourse, and on the grounds of the universalized version of western Man. Rather, habeas viscus points to the terrain of humanity as a relational assemblage exterior to the jurisdiction of law given that the law can bequeath or rescind ownership of the body so that it becomes the property of proper persons but does not possess the authority to nullify the politics and poetics of the flesh found in the traditions of the oppressed. As a way of conceptualizing politics, then, habeas viscus diverges from the discourses and institutions that yoke the flesh to political violence in the modus of deviance. Instead, it translates the hieroglyphics of the flesh into a potentiality in any and all things, an originating leap in the imagining of future anterior freedoms and new genres of humanity. To envisage habeas viscus as a forceful assemblage of humanity entails leaving behind the world of Man and some of its attendant humanist pieties. As opposed to depositing the flesh outside politics, the normal, the human, and so on, we need a better understanding of its varied workings in order to disrobe the cloak of Man, which gives the human a long-overdue extreme makeover; or, in the words of Sylvia Wynter, “the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e. western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.” 32 Claiming and dwelling in the monstrosity of the flesh present some of the weapons in the guerrilla warfare to “secure the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species,” since these liberate from captivity assemblages of life, thought, and politics from the tradition of the oppressed and, as a result, disfigure the centrality of Man as the sign for the human. As an assemblage of humanity, habeas viscus animates the elsewheres of Man and emancipates the true potentiality that rests in those subjects who live behind the veil of the permanent state of exception: freedom; assemblages of freedom that sway to the temporality of new syncopated beginnings for the human beyond the world and continent of Man. German r&b group Glashaus’s track “Bald (und wir sind frei) [Soon (and We Are Free)]” performs this overdetermined idea of freedom as disarticulated from Man both graphically and sonically. Paying tribute to both the nineteenth-century spiritual “We’ll Soon Be Free,” written on the eve of the American Civil War, and Donny Hathaway’s 1973 recording, “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” Glashaus’s title “Bald (und wir sind frei)” enacts the disrupted yet intertwined notions of freedom, temporality, and sociality that I am gesturing to here. 33 In contrast to its predecessors, which are resolutely located in the future via the use of soon / someday and the future tense, Glashaus’s version renders freedom in the present tense, albeit qualified by the imminent future of “bald [soon]” and by the typographical parenthetical enclosure of “(und wir sind frei) [and we are free].” The flow of the parentheses intimates both distance and nearness, ragging the homogeneous, empty future of “soon” with a potential present of a “responsible freedom” (Spillers) and/as sociality. The and and the parentheses are the conduits for bringing-into-relation freedom’s nowtime and its constitutive potential futurity without resolving their tension. The lyrics of “Bald (und wir sind frei)” once again exemplify this complementary strain in that the words in the verses are resolutely future oriented, ending with the invocation of “bald” just before the chorus, which, held in the potential abyss of the present, repeats, “und wir sind frei.” Likewise, in the verses, Glashaus’s singer Cassandra Steen, accompanied only by a grand piano, just about whispers, whereas she opens up to a more mellifluous style of singing in the chorus; as a result, the verses (bald/future) sound constricted and restrictive but only when heard in relation to the expansive spatiality of the chorus (present). What initially looks like a bracketed afterthought on the page punctures the putatively central point in the sonic realm. It is not a vacant, uniform, or universal future that sets in motion liberty but rather the future as it is seen, felt, and heard from the enfleshed parenthetical present of the oppressed, since this group’s now is always already bracketed (held captive and set aside indefinitely) in, if not antithetical to, the world of Man. The domain of habeas viscus represents one significant mechanism by which the world of Man constrains subjects to the parenthetical, while at the same time disavowing this tendency via recourse to the abnormal and/ or inhuman. Heard, seen, tasted, felt, and lived in the ethereal shadows of Man’s world, however, a habeas viscus unearths the freedom that exists within the hieroglyphics of the flesh. For the oppressed the future will have been now, since Man tucks away this group’s present in brackets. Consequently, the future anterior transmutes the simple (parenthetical) present of the dysselected into the nowtime of humanity during which the fleshy hieroglyphics of the oppressed will have actualized the honeyed prophecy of another kind of freedom (which can be imagined but not [yet] described) in the revolutionary apocatastasis of human genres.OverviewsO/V We agree that restrictions of speech are probably a bad thing – the question is how do we resist institutional policing of speech? The 1AC says that we should have a legal protection to stop what the government is doing in order to protect our rights – we instead affirm the potentiality in restricting speech because it pushes us to create languages that are unintelligible to the world of Man – when speech is restricted, it doesn’t just go away like the 1AC assumes, but we find ways of subverting censorship – think of slave songs like “Gather at the River” – slaves were able to create languages to create lines of flights away from surveillance – This gives us an unintelligiability net benefit via Wehelieye 3 – the alternative creates languages that cannot be tracked by the state apparatus which also means we solve case better than you do because we create new forms of communication that the government can’t understand. The very idea of a person under the law creates categories of what marginalization is – outside of the category of person. You cannot solve police brutality or antiblack violence by trying to include people into the concept of personhood because that necessitates a category of beings who exist outside of it. For example, the gay rights movement incorporated a privileged minority, ie white wealthy gay men, into personhood so they can celebrate marriage equality, but queer people of color are still locked up.The role of the ballot is to deconstruct the idea of the capital M European Man system. This creates the conditions for humanity - who is human enough to protect and who is criminal enough to lock away. This is the very mindset of the prison industrial complex - That’s Weheliye 14 – This produces the notion of Man - a figure all bodies are compared against. This creates the conditions between humans and not-quite-humans which is the root cause of all violence - i.e. dehumanization of certain bodies based on their difference from that idea. Instead of trying to include more people into our legal sphere, we need to deconstruct the idea of a human subject in a first place. That’s Weheliye 2. THIS TURNS AND OUTWEIGHS CASE – Turns aff solvency – you create a ruse of solvency in which we think the government is actually letting us dissent but people who are loked in solidary confinement or who are homeless or muselmenn cannot articulate their experience within the Language of Man – freedom of speech cannot exist for people who are not seen as human Scope – Weheliye 2 says this is the root cause of all oppression because all people are marginalized because they don’t reach the standard of humanity – which means all people are compared against this – this creates the conditions for exclusion The alternative is Habeas Viscus - this is a method embracing alternative understandings of the idea of a human outside of the judicial sphere and creating ever changing ideas of humanity that interrupt radicalizing studies – instead of trying to incorporate bodies into the legal personhood, we embrace the spaces outside of it – think of the Black Panthers. That’s Weheliye 4. Alt solves case – that’s Weheliye 3 – we create different understandings of language that are unintellible and unrecognizable - A2 Policy MakingO/V – 1. The thesis of the K is about orienting ourselves towards the liminal spaces outside of legal personhood which policies obviously cannot resolve – you need to beat back the K to get access to this2. Turn – policy making doesn’t necessitate comparing two policies – policies are often presented against outside resistance and demands – we still access policy education by comparing the aff policy to the grassroots movement of the K. This is a better type of debate because (a) it forces you to defend your assumptions – ie why is state action the correct solution and (b) we will never be policy makers but we will have the chance to engage in grassroots which means it’s the most applicable. Warran Add on The 1AC is premised on a politics of hope wed to the notion that society is always redeemable, always progressing, but never quite here. This politics of affirming progress-to-come naturalizes anti-black violence and rests on black flesh. Only abandoning the aff's political hope subverts this myth of progress which coheres itself through black suffering.Warren 15 Calvin L. Warren "Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope" The New Centennial Review, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2015, Michigan State UniversityWe find similar logic in the contemporary moment. Renisha McBride, Jordon Davis, Kody Ingham, Amadou Diallo, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Frederick Jermain Carter, Chavis Carter, Timothy Stansbury, Hadiya Pendleton, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Kendrec McDade, Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown, among others, constitute a fatal rupture of the Political; these signifiers, stained in blood, refuse the closure that the Political promises. They haunt political discourses of progress, betterment, equality, citizenship, and justice—the metaphysical organization of social existence. We are witnessing a shocking accumulation of injured and mutilated black bodies, particularly young black bodies, which place what seems to be an unanswerable question mark in the political field: if we are truly progressing toward this “society-that-is-to-come (maybe),” why is black suffering increasing at such alarming rates? In response to this inquiry, we are told to keep struggling, keep “hope” alive, and keep the faith. After George Zimmerman was acquitted for murdering Trayvon Martin, President Obama addressed the nation and importuned us to keep fighting for change because “each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes toward race” and, if we work hard enough, we will move closer to “becoming a more perfect union.” Despite Martin’s corpse lingering in the minds of young people and Zimmerman’s smile of relief after the verdict, we are told that things are actually getting better. Supposedly, the generation that murdered Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride is much better than the generation that murdered Emmett Till. Black suffering, here, is instrumentalized to accomplish pedagogical, cathartic, and redemptive objectives and, somehow, the growing number of dead black bodies in the twenty-first century is an indication of our progress toward “perfection.” Is perfection predicated on black death? How many more black bodies must be lynched, mutilated, burned, castrated, raped, dismembered, shot, and disabled before we achieve this “more perfect union”? In many ways, black suffering and death become the premiere vehicles of political perfection and social maturation. This essay argues that the logic of the Political—linear temporality, biopolitical futurity, perfection, betterment, and redress—sustains black suffering. Progress and perfection are worked through the pained black body and any recourse to the Political and its discourse of hope will ultimately reproduce the very metaphysical structures of violence that pulverize black being. This piece attempts to rescue black nihilism from discursive and intellectual obliteration; rather than thinking about black nihilism as a set of pathologies in need of treatment, this essay considers black nihilism a necessary philosophical posture capable of unraveling the Political and its devastating logic of political hope. Black nihilism resists emancipatory rhetoric that assumes it is possible to purge the Political of anti-black violence and advances political apostasy as the only “ethical” response to black suffering.[…]Throughout this essay, I have argued that the Politics of hope preserve metaphysical structures that sustain black suffering. This preservation amounts to an exploitation of hope—when the Political colonizes the spiritual principle of hope and puts it in the service of extending the “will to power” of an anti-black organization of existence. The Politics of hope, then, is bound up with metaphysical violence [that], and this violence masquerades as a “solution” to the problem of anti-blackness. Temporal linearity, perfection, betterment, struggle, work, and utopian futurity are conceptual instruments of the Political that will never obviate black suffering or anti-black violence; these concepts only serve to reproduce the conditions that render existence unbearable for blacks. Political theologians and black optimists avoid the immediacy of black suffering, the horror of anti-black pulverization, and place relief in a “not-yet-but-is (maybe)-to-come-social order” that, itself, can do little more but admonish blacks to survive to keep struggling. Political hope becomes a vicious and abusive cycle of struggle—it mirrors the Lacanian drive, and we encircle an object (black freedom, justice, relief, redress, equality, etc.) that is inaccessible because it doesn’t really exist. The political theologian and black optimist, then, propose a collective Jouissance as an answer to black suffering—finding the joy in struggle, the victory in toil, and the satisfaction in inefficacious action. We continue to “struggle” and “work” as black youth are slaughtered daily, black bodies are incarcerated as forms of capital, black infant mortality rates are soaring, and hunger is disabling the bodies, minds, and spirits of desperate black youth. In short, these conditions are deep metaphysical problems—the sadistic pleasure of metaphysical domination— and “work” and “struggle” avoid the terrifying fact that the world depends on black death to sustain itself. Black nihilism attempts to break this “drive”—to stop it in its tracks, as it were—and to end the cycle of insanity that political hope perpetuates. The question that remains is a question often put to the black nihilist: what is the point? This compulsory geometrical structuring of thought—all knowledge must submit to, and is reducible to, a point—it is an epistemic flicker of certainty, determination, and, to put it bluntly, life. “The point” exists for life; it enlivens, enables, and sustains knowledge. Thought outside of this mandatory point is illegible and useless. To write outside of the “episteme of life” and its grammar will require a position outside of this point, a position somewhere in the infinite horizon of thought (perhaps this is what Heidegger wanted to do with his reconfiguration of thought). Writing in this way is inherently subversive and refuses the geometry of thought. Nevertheless, the nihilist is forced to enunciate his refusal through a “point,” a point that is contradictory and paradoxical all at once. To say that the point of this essay is that “the point” is fraudulent—its promise of clarity and life are inadequate— will not satisfy the hunger of disciplining the nihilist and insisting that one undermine the very ground upon which one stands. Black nihilistic hermeneutics resists “the point” but is subjected to it to have one’s voice heard within the marketplace of ideas. The “point” of this essay is that political hope is pointless. Black suffering is an essential part of the world, and placing hope in the very structure that sustains metaphysical violence, the Political, will never resolve anything. This is why the black nihilist speaks of “exploited hope,” and the black nihilist attempts to wrest hope from the clutches of the Political. Can we think of hope outside the Political? Must “salvation” translate into a political grammar or a political program? The nihilist, then, hopes for the end of political hope and its metaphysical violence. Nihilism is not antithetical to hope; it does not extinguish hope but reconfigures it. Hope is the foundation of the black nihilistic hermeneutic. In “Blackness and Nothingness,” Fred Moten (2013) conceptualizes blackness as a “pathogen” to metaphysics, something that has the ability to unravel, to disable, and to destroy anti-blackness. If we read Vattimo through Moten’s brilliant analysis, we can suggest that blackness is the limit that Heidegger and Nietzsche were really after. It is a “blackened” world that will ultimately end metaphysics, but putting an end to metaphysics will also put an end to the world itself—this is the nihilism that the black nihilist must theorize through. This is a far cry from what we call “anarchy,” however. The black nihilist has as little faith in the metaphysical reorganization of society through anarchy than he does in traditional forms of political existence. The black nihilist offers political apostasy as the spiritual practice of denouncing metaphysical violence, black suffering, and the idol of antiblackness. The act of renouncing will not change political structures or offer a political program; instead, it is the act of retrieving the spiritual concept of hope from the captivity of the Political. Ultimately, it is impossible to end metaphysics without ending blackness, and the black nihilist will never be able to withdraw from the Political completely without a certain death-drive or being-toward-death. This is the essence of black suffering: the lack of reprieve from metaphysics, the tormenting complicity in the reproduction of violence, and the lack of a coherent grammar to articulate these dilemmas. After contemplating these issues for some time in my office, I decided to take a train home. As I awaited my train in the station, an older black woman asked me about the train schedule and when I would expect the next train headed toward Dupont Circle. When I told her the trains were running slowly, she began to talk about the government shutdown. “They don’t care anything about us, you know,” she said. “We elect these people into office, we vote for them, and they watch black people suffer and have no intentions of doing anything about it.” I shook my head in agreement and listened intently. “I’m going to stop voting, and supporting this process; why should I keep doing this and our people continue to suffer,” she said. I looked at her and said, “I don’t know ma’am; I just don’t understand it myself.” She then laughed and thanked me for listening to her—as if our conversation were somewhat cathartic. “You know, people think you’re crazy when you say things like this,” she said giving me a wink. “Yes they do,” I said. “But I am a free woman,” she emphasized “and I won’t go back.” Shocked, I smiled at her, and she winked at me; at that moment I realized that her wisdom and courage penetrated my mind and demanded answers. I’ve thought about this conversation for some time, and it is for this reason I had to write this essay. To the brave woman at the train station, I must say you are not crazy at all but thinking outside of metaphysical time, space, and violence. Ultimately, we must hope for the end of political hopeO/V Macro StructuresEven if you win that macro structures come first – only the alt can solve – only we can explain why structures of oppression like militarism occur which means only we have explanatory powerBut prefer micro politics over macro politics – even if structures are bad we need to be able to survive within those structures in the meantime which means only we are an accessible survival strategy because its literally about embracing spaces inaccessible to policies A2 Policy Focus = FairPrefer critical justifications over theoretical ones on portability – fairness only lasts for this round while the skills we learn last for the rest of our lives - even if our model of debate is a little less fair, if it teaches us to be better people that is more important because it’s the end goal of debateTurn – our model of debate is a lot more inclusive – policy debates require tons of util prep on empirics and politics updates which excludes people who can’t spend all of their lives cutting updates all the time – inclusivity outweighs because fairness only matters if people are in debate in the first placeTurn – our model of debate is most fair because it creates reciprocal burdens – you prove you deconstruct the European Man better than I do It’s not my fault you wrote a bad aff – you should’ve put more reps offense in the 1AC – don’t blame me for you having only one type of offenseMooting aff is inevitable – every 1N strategy moots AC offense, that’s the point of a strategic NC – ie people will just read PICsEmpirically denied – you had reps offense in the aff – I didn’t moot all your offense Turn – our model of debate gives you a lot better ground because you have access to policy making good and cede the political A2 Bleiker – Methodological Pluralism No link – we aren’t making a generic RC claim like “anthro root cause of racism”, but rather making a claim about why violence occurs A2 Zanotti -- HeutisticTurn – If we win the K that means you are a bad heuristic and we shouldn’t role play as policy makers I meet – the K is an analysis of how power operates within institutions, it is just a bottom up analysis – prefer our analysis – we will never be policy makers but we have to decide how to orient ourselves towards oppression every day which means its most real worldNo impact – great, you were a good heuristic, that doesn’t disprove the Kritik at allA2 Pappas – Particularism Turn – particularism is bad - if you don’t have a general account of the world you have no predictive power and can’t solve anything – you need a general account of power to know what particular details matter The K tells us what particulars matter – ie the particularities of the flesh – not all particular details of the aff are relevant*A2 CrenshawA2 CoverstoneTurn – fiat is illusory- nothing happens when we leave the room, no policy is passed, which means only the alt is actual tangible policiesTurn – policy making makes us spectators to oppression because we give our agency to the USFG and ignore our own role in oppression – this disempowers students to make real change and makes us worse policy makers Turn – engaging in radical critical theory teaches us how to think critically which teaches us the skills to go out and create change after debate – the Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle in Baltimore prove A2 LesterNo link – we don’t defend a general “anti-humanism” alt – habeas viscus is a very specific methodology as to how we resist humanism This evidence isn’t comparative – just because people did bad things under the guise of anti-humanism doesn’t mean its comparatively worse – our evidence is the only one making a comparative claim This is just false – the enlightenment era and British colonialism was not anti-humanist – it was the definition of humanism – ie using rationality as a justification for slaughtering Indigenous communitiesA2 MaterialismTurn – we control the internal link to materialism – only we can explain why the material impacts that structure marginalized communities exist – ie they are not seen as humanTurn – the alternative is most material because it is literally embracing the spaces of those who do not have access to University dissent or policy making – Trayvon Martin couldn’t go to Congress and ask for his right to free speech, but he could’ve joined the Black PanthersIf we win the K then you cannot account for materialism of those outside the marginsA2 DreyfusEven if you aren’t an expansion of the state, you expand the notion of the European Man which is still badEven if you don’t expand the state, you still proactively prevent challenges to it CardsTheir overdetermination of what activism and engagement looks like is precisely the point—we should explode those enclosings of the organism as suchSvirsky 10 Marcelo Svirsky, professor of critical and cultural theory at Cardiff University (UK), “Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics,” Deleuze Studies Vol 4: 2010, pg. 3Rather than problematising the political, this royal understanding of activism uses its ‘metric power’ to axiomatise politics, while simultaneously repressing activist experiences that refuse simply to align with ‘the given’ of formal politics. An example of this can be seen in the hostility of western states towards organisations such as ‘Wikileaks’ or the ‘Animal rights movement’, each of which are immersed in creative acts of citizenship that actualise ruptures. Such new scenes and acts are constantly at risk of being appropriated by this royal science of politics, which imposes upon them a model that channels civic participation according to established rules and concepts. Activisms that seek only to guarantee the workings of representative democracy are essentially slave activisms; they dwell in safety and their impact and potential is expected to be absorbed without drawing the system into new structures of resonance. The assumption that ‘mass participation is the lifeblood of representative democracy’ not only imposes a particular model of the political, it also reinforces a pejorative way to conceive activism. By positing representative democracy (or any other regime) as the reified model of political process, theory necessarily idealises certain forms of involvement over others. For example, classical participatory theory is often blind to [unable to comprehend] the creative significance of the activist energies being unfolded in such events as critical teaching in schools, revolutionary philosophical writing, the deconstructive effect of a critical assemblage that confronts patriarchal power, or of civic homosexuality which disrupts heterosexism. In fact, the assumptions underlying ‘representative’ participation are troublesome for at least two reasons. Firstly, participation in the formal political process of ‘representative democracy’ does not in itself necessarily implicate a critical attitude or action, seeking a less repressive and more creative life. To evidence this, it is enough to keep in mind some fearful recent examples of mass political support for ‘representative’ state violence, as occurred last May when thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and the streets of Jerusalem to back the killing by the Israeli Defence Forces of nine activists from the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, as they boarded the Mavi Marmara ship sailing to Gaza as part of a humanitarian flotilla. Similarly, we might remain mindful of other, no less electrifying, cases of popular support for wars and genocides in South America, Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, or of events such as the Holocaust. In these instances, mass participation more accurately falls within the Reichian analysis of a popular ‘desire for fascism’–which lies worlds away from a participatory liberalism that idealises the commitment of the public to activist citizenship (see Isin 2009) and to the tolerant ‘good life’ that western democracy claims to represent. Secondly, passivity is not necessarily a sign of political anaemia, but may be a cultural expression that requires local explanation. Here, research at times confuses the visible with the political: absence of visible mass participation might be a sign of unconscious and pre-conscious compliance with ongoing forms of oppression, and can impact more energetically on the perpetuation of a regime than can tangible acts of the body – these modes of active abandonment produce the reign of daily microfascisms. After Deleuze and Guattari, political activism may be approached in a fundamentally different way: without an image, without a form. As Deleuze and Guattari make clear, the interaction between royal and nomad science produces a ‘constantly shifting borderline’, meaning that there is always some element that escapes containment by the ‘iron collars’ of representation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367; see also Deleuze 1994). This occurs when the plane of consistency is passionately thrown against the plane of organisation, when a nomad element inserts itself in political struggles in which, for instance, the boundaries of citizenship are challenged and reopened (as occurred in the struggle associated with the sans-papiers movement, see Isin 2009), or barriers of ethnic segregation are challenged by new forms of interculturalism (as occurs with bilingual forms of education). It is through these ‘smallest deviations’ that smooth types of political activity dwell within the striated forms of state politics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 371). Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophies have created some of the conceptual tools which may be put to innovative use in activism that seeks to break with repressive traditions. Their alien relation to the standards set by the royal science of politics (see Patton 2000) – an alienation laid out in the philosophical resources they draw on, in the issues and concepts that characterise their work and, principally, in the incessant movement of their thought – points towards a richer philosophical weaponry with which to confront and possibly overcome political inhibitions, in both knowledge and practice.Re-signification DA – Their assertion that “the alternative is not political” and that “debate should be grounded in the desirability of the plan” only reifies colonial, disciplinary architectures – the alternative solves precisely because it shakes the foundation of how you judge the debate – ie outside the World of Man?alk?vik 13It is their shared concern with the temporality of world politics that situates different forms of critical thinking on common ground: they all attempt to expose the way in which what is presented as given and natural is historically produced and hence open to change. By focusing on change, challenging existing power relations, and showing how contemporary practices and discourses contribute to the perpetuation of hegemonic structures of power and domination, critical IR, it seems, partakes in the effort to “ brush history against the grain ” (Benjamin 2007: 257). However, despite its claim to be untimely, critical theorizing in IR, paradoxically, is construed in quite a timely fashion. With a perceived disjuncture between writing the world from within a discipline and acting in it from the center of the debates, the performance of critical thought is actually evaluated based upon its punctuality — its capacity to be in synch with the times of global politics. Does critical thought provide concrete guidance and prescribe what is to be done? Can it move beyond mere talk and make timely political interventions by providing solutions? Does it have answers to the strategic questions of progressive movements? Demanding that critical theorizing should come clean in the court of these questions, such conceptions of untimeliness force critique to be on time. Within this framing, some forms of critical theorizing — namely, thinking that is viewed as less abstract, more committed to action, and hence better equipped to deal with “real world” problems — are considered more useful, while those that do not prove concrete guidance for progressive political change — that “[do] not open up to where work needs to be done” (Beardsworth 2005: 234) — are branded as inefficient tools for engaging with the perplexities of global politics. The paradoxical demand that critique should be timely comes across clearly in Anna Aganthangelou and L.H.M. Ling’s (1997) major point of contention with certain forms of critical thought in IR. Dissident voices, “ [p]olitics of resistance [which] offer little of transformation for those marginalized, silenced and exiled, ” they write, amounts to an expression of “ dissident luxury of observing from off-shore ” (Aganthangelou and Ling 1997: 9). On this account, forms of critique that prioritize ambiguity, hybridity and interstitial subject positions “paralyze [themselves] to non-action” (Aganthangelou and Ling 1997: 7) and carry little utility for progressive politics. Hence, forms of critical theorizing that do not prove themselves to be timely by providing a program for emancipatory action are branded as not critical at all, but complicit and conservative. A similar demand for critique to be timely and its perceived failure to deliver its promise underwrites Milja Kurki’s (2011: 129) disillusionment with critical IR theory and her diagnosis of “the dismal ‘real-world’ failure of critical and philosophical research in IR.” Failure, in this view, stems from critical scholarly discourses falling short of having a “real-world” impact in terms of affecting any change in political and economic structures. Once again, anxiety about the relevance of critique — whether or not it is in synch with political time, timed properly or timely in the sense of being appropriate and fitting to the times under diagnosis — becomes the main premise for assessing critical theorizing. Critique in IR, we are told, is “increasingly lacking in relevance in contributing to revitalisation of policy practice or perceptive critiques of it” (Kurki 2011: 130). Critique is lacking because it is not timely enough, not in step, and falling behind due to its “ abstract and theory-driven nature ” and “ lack of realistic understanding as to how to challenge the dominance of hegemonic ideas ” (Kurki 2011: 130). Such observations about the “lack” of critique bear their mark in the 2007 special issue of the Review of International Studies, which commemorates the 25th anniversary of the publication of two key texts in critical IR theory by reflecting upon the impact of critical theorizing upon the discipline and interrogating what its future might be. Assessing the current state of critical theory in IR, the introductory article suggests that “ the fundamental philosophical question [that] can no longer be sidestepped” by critical IR theory is the relation between “ knowledge of the world and action in it ” (Rengger and Thirkell-White 2007: 16). Forms of critical theorizing that leave the future “to contingency, uncertainty and the multiplicity of political projects” and therefore provide “less guidance for concrete political action” (Rengger and Thirkell-White 2007: 15) or, again, those that problematize underlying assumptions of thought and “say little about the potential political agency that might be involved in any subsequent struggles” (Rengger and Thirkell-White 2007: 20) may render the critical enterprise impotent. This point comes out most clearly in Craig Murphy’s (2007) contribution. Echoing William Wallace’s (1996) argument that critical theorists tend to be “monks” with little to offer to political actors engaged in real world politics, Murphy argues that the promise of critical theory has been only “partially kept” due to its limited influence outside the academy. Building a different world, he suggests, requires more than isolated academic talk and demands not only “words,” but “deeds” (Murphy 2007: 124). This, according to Murphy, requires providing “knowledge that contributes to change” (2007: 127). Such angst about critique’s inability to be timely culminated recently in the addition of a fourth episode to the unfolding first, second, and third chapters of discipline-making debates. The issue is unequivocally formulated by Steven Roach (2008: xxi): “whether we can develop an empirical and policy-relevant critical IR theory is precisely [the] issue that lies at the core of what some are referring to as a fourth debate.” What emerges from such discussions about the meaning of being critical is that if critique is to be worthy of its name, it needs to be in synch with political time and to respond to its immediate demands. The task of critique, it is argued, is to be “on the spot” and to “hit the mark” rather than to disrupt the limits of what are presented as “realistic” choices. One is prompted to ask whose “realistic understanding” of the unfolding crisis of global politics critique is considered to be lacking for. Or, perhaps more importantly, one is left bewildered at a formulation of critique in which thinking is reduced to an act of hitting the mark, a form of targeting practice. 2 Stated less metaphorically, critical theorizing is conceptualized as a tool that seeks to resolve contradictions, and to provide coherence to historical and political perplexities that resist easy solutions. It is defined as a form of timely intervention, an endeavor that responds to what is deemed a political exigency by institutionalized sites of knowledge production. Reinserting the “false dichotomy” between critical theory and political action, such a framing obscures the fact that “the difference between various theories rests not on their level of abstraction and programmatic focus … but on the nature of their relationship to the exercise of power and the social-relational positions and practices through which power operates” (Duvall and Varadarajan 2003: 81). Critique out of synch Can critique be judged solely in terms of its “utility” and relevance for political struggles that are perceived as going on “out there,” outside of a disciplinary context? How can we think about the relation between critique and the crisis that triggers it without succumbing to the temptation to tame that which is by definition untimely through an injunction that it be properly timed in response to a crisis? And what difference would such a recasting make? How would it help to think about claiming the international as a critical project? Perhaps a useful way to grapple with these questions is by revisiting the question of what it means to be untimely. For this, I turn to political theorist Wendy Brown’s (2005) exegesis of Walter Benjamin’s (2007) “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which disrupts predominant understandings of the meaning of critical thought. Such a re-casting of the meaning of critique as an untimely intervention starts from an effort to trace the etymological roots of the word “critique” so as to recover the intimate link between critical thinking and the crisis that triggers it; a link that was severed with the rise of the modern political order and the consequent de-politicization of critique as a subjective, private affair, a philosophical activity divorced from the realm of politics (Koselleck 1988). Severing critique from politics in modernity pivoted on a conception of political time in which moral progress and the “inevitable” triumph of reason were secured through a teleological narrative of history. 3 Prior to their modern rendering as two separate domains — critique as a subjective affair, a private judgment passed about a worldly event, and crisis as an objective condition belonging to the public realm — critique and crisis were fused in the same concept krin?, which meant “to separate,” to “choose,” to “judge,” to “decide” (Koselleck 2006: 358). This concept was intimately related to politics as it connoted a “divorce” or “quarrel,” but also a moment of making a decision, reaching a verdict or judgment (kritik). In Athenian democracy where the defendant was both a citizen and a member of the Senate constituting the jury, “krisis referred to a scene in which the object, agent, process, and result of critique were intermingled” (Brown 2005: 5). Recognition of an objective crisis and subjective judgments passed on it were fused and implicated in each other. Consequently, there could be no such thing as “mere critique” or “untimely critique,” given that the project of critique always entailed a concern with political time as krisis signified a crucial point for restoring justice and ensuring the prospects for the continuity of the political community. It is this intimate, severed link between crisis and critique that Wendy Brown’s discussion brings to the fore and re-problematizes. According to her, the practice of critical theory appeals to a concern with political time to the extent that “[t]he crisis that incites critique and that critique engages itself signals a rupture of temporal continuity, which is at the same time a rupture in political imaginary” (2005: 7). It is a particular experience with time, with the present, that informs critical theorizing. Rather than an unmoving or an automatically overcome present (a present that is out of time), the present is interpreted as an opening that calls for a response. This call for a response highlights the idea that, far from being a luxury, critique is non-optional in nature. 4 Such an understanding of critical thought is premised on a historical consciousness that grasps the present historically so as to break with the self-conception of the age. In its attempt to grasp the times in their singularity, critique is cast neither as breaking free from its weight (which would amount to ahistoricity) nor being weighed down by the times (as in the case of teleology). It is an attitude that renders the present a site of “non-utopian possibility” since it is historically situated and constrained, yet also a possibility since it is not historically foreordained or determined (Brown 2005: 12 – 13). In its relation to political time, critique entails contestation of what is presented as “realistic” political choices and overturning the confinement of politics to existing possibilities. 5 Such a conception of critique in relation to political time provides a counternarrative to prevalent conceptions of the meaning of critique within the discipline of IR. Brown’s analysis is especially significant for highlighting the immediately political nature of critique. It challenges the dominant notion that critical thought is a self-indulgent, disinterested, distanced or purely “academic” practice unless it is overtly committed to political action and ready to offer concrete solutions in the face of urgent questions posed by global politics. Instead, untimely critique is portrayed as a force of disruption, a form of intervention that reconfigures the meaning of the times by “allowing thinking its wildness beyond the immediate in order to reset the possibilities of the immediate” (Brown 2005: 15). Untimeliness is not to be mistaken for a method, a tool that can be deployed at the service of advancing disciplinary knowledge around pre-articulated questions of world politics. In other words, such a conception of the untimely does not imply a process of re-signification within the established parameters of a disciplinary discourse. Such a move would be tantamount to an affirmative intervention that investigates foundations only to fortify the disciplinary architecture (Mowitt 1992). Rather, critique as untimely thinking, conceived in the terms encouraged by Brown’s reading, entails a gesture of de-signification that exposes the constitutive silences of that discourse. Stated differently, it entails an attempt to think about “how, under certain conditions, certain kinds of questions cannot be posed or, rather, can only be framed and posed by breaking through a certain prohibition that functions to condition and circumscribe the domain of the speakable” (Butler 2009: 776 – 7). It calls for challenging prevailing structures of domination and an opening up of new political possibilities beyond what is recognized as a legitimate form of acting, being and knowing. An untimely intervention is akin to what Butler describes as the staging of a “rogue viewpoint”— that which cannot be spoken without inflicting some damage to the idea of what is thinkable and speakable. It is precisely this conception of the untimely that I want to highlight in coming to terms with the meaning of claiming the international as a critical project. A project that explores worldings beyond the West cannot merely attempt to consolidate disciplinary protocols by interrogating difference with a view to rendering it more universal and globally encompassing. Rather, the promise of claims on the international as untimely interventions lies in their attempt to unravel the silent disciplinary protocols that determine which questions are legitimate to ask and the framework that informs them. This de-signifying gesture can be clarified and contextualized through reference to the popular question about dialogue and difference within IR. In an exemplary staging of affirmative critique, a prominent disciple writes that the idea that “[t]he study of International Relations … neglects or marginalizes the world beyond the West is no longer a novel argument” (Acharya 2011: 620). “Critical” acknowledgment of this disciplinary blindness [nescience] is followed by the assertion of the need to “find some agreement on how to redress this problem and move forward” (ibid.). Implicit in this argument is an understanding of difference as a problem encountered on the way toward a prefigured destination —“a genuinely international field of IR” (ibid.) — a disciplinary synthesis in which difference is envisioned as a moment in the dialectical interplay toward a “higher” resolution. The question posed about difference is constrained to what a disciplinary setting allows. As Mustapha Kamal Pasha (2011: 685) notes, not engaging with the limits “internal to IR” and avoiding interrogation of the “substrata of assumed settlements” that render secured trips undertaken by such forms of “critical” thinking do nothing less than to ensure the “endur[ance] of IR as a cultural project equipped with the language of universality.” Such lines of questioning thus work to affirm what they set out to negate. Taking a “rouge” route and brushing against the grain of disciplinary reason reveals alternative possibilities in terms of claiming the international. Untimely critiques of disciplinary injunctions for dialogue expose the ways in which such calls re-inscribe the subject of IR, both that which the discipline talks about and those who can participate in such a dialogue. Rather than reproducing the disciplinary subject, they dismantle it by problematizing the grounds upon which the disciplinary object gets pre-emptively sequestered within the domain of familiar codes of enunciation (Grovogui 1998) and the subjects who can speak are reinstated as the privileged members of a “whites only” club (Shilliam 2011). Such inquiries unsettle the very terms of disciplinary discourse, pointing the way to a whole series of novel questions to investigate, and to alternative, anti-imperial paths to explore. 6 Raising questions that cannot be raised within the boundaries of a disciplinary discourse, and acute awareness of and attunement to the variegated forms in which power and domination operates, renders critical thinking an untimely endeavor. Hence, its responsiveness and responsibility toward its time cannot be solely determined by explicit commitment to practical political action, policy relevance, and programmatic commitments — in other words, its punctuality. As David Campbell (2005) reminds us, as scholars “we are always already engaged.” Therefore, the question is not whether as scholars — critical or otherwise — we are engaged or not, but rather what the nature of our engagement is. 7 “Ethos of political criticism”— an ethos “which takes as its object assumptions, limits, their historical production, social and political effects, and the possibility of going beyond them in thought and action” (Campbell 2005: 133) — places the relevance of critical thought and the responsibility of critical scholarship on a different ground than the one that timely understandings of untimely critique force critical engagements into. Foregrounding this ethos does not mean that critique does not commit itself to certain political visions and affirm particular courses of action. On the contrary, as Brown (2005: 16) suggests, critical theory “cannot get off the block without affirming contestable and contingent values.” What this proposition does mean, however, is that whatever form it takes, critique as untimely endeavor insists upon the political nature of all interpretation and refuses the blackmail of ahistorical, normative assertions and moralizing timeless, utopian visions that ultimately demand that critique abide by predetermined protocols. An untimely critique of the discipline presents a claim — not a demand — on the international to the extent that “as an act of reclamation” it takes over the disciplinary object — the international —“for a different project than that to which it is currently tethered” (Brown 2005: 16). Untimely critique is not secured, it is open and demanding. It does not guarantee, but doubts, hesitates, and returns again and again to the same texts of the international to recover and reclaim the disciplinary object without any reservations.Policies asks the wrong question and continues to extend the neoliberal white supremacist carcaral system. We don’t need rights from the system, we need resistance. Turns your [real change/materiality good] arguments Jordan 14 Taryn D. Jordan December 2014 College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University "THE POLITICS OF IMPOSSIBILITY: CECE MCDONALD AND TRAYVON MARTIN— THE BURSTING OF BLACK RAGE"My thinking of the politics of impossibility does not come out of a vacuum; at least two other scholars who are active in queer and transgender activist politics have been thinking closely about what it means to become comfortable with the possibilities of impossible demands. Stephen Dillon notes in his article “The Only Freedom I Can See” that freedom in terms of rights-based campaigns and policy platforms do not provide a pathway to a queer imaginable world, a world free from police and prisons (Dillon 182). He comes to this conclusion by exchanging letters between two different gender queer prisoners who are serving life in prison. Prisoner R notes that she finds her freedom after living in a solitary confinement cell through her physical death in a prison cell, “The only freedom I can see/Is Death in a prison cell” (Prisoner R 181). The impossibility of queer and transgender subjects in prison is based on the shift towards neoliberal politics by the LGBT movement, which is no longer interested in members of the community who are most affected by poverty, transphobia, and white supremacy. Instead LGBT politics became concerned with neoliberal economies of gay respectability, economic affluence and whiteness (Dillon 181). Thus, it ultimately left those queer and transgender bodies behind in the chase for marriage and military, two institutions steeped in neoliberalism. Gay marriage creates a hetronormative family that is legible to the state and capable of being self-sufficient, leaving out the need for state of federal social welfare. Militarism broadens the project of American imperialism by incorporating gay and lesbian bodies, once seen as abject, into the fold of the American dream. The focus on marriage and military has the effect of splitting the LGBT political base into those who are legible and those who are not. Dean Spade is also an activist and legal scholar who is interested in thinking though the potential of a politics based on impossibility. He, along with Morgan Bassichis and Alexander Lee in their article “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got,” charts a variety of problems affecting poor and people of color (POC) gender queer and transgender people. I see their activist-focused manifesto as a way to think through the possibilities of impossibility, what they are demanding of us as activists and scholars is to think outside of the marriage and military fights put forward by mainstream LGBT movements (Bassichis, Lee, Spade 36). Instead they are interested in a politic that links to other struggles, seeks change that is focused on mass societal change verse policy-only strategies, that desires social transformation, and that attacks systems that affect queer POC and trans subjectivities the most. Taken together, these strategies urge us to become comfortable with politics that leaves no one behind, and think through how such a politic could be effective to all impossible bodies (Bassichis, Lee, and Spade 37). Both Dillon and Bassichis, et al situate their work as rooted in critiquing LGBT politics writ large. While this is a worthy fight, I aim to take their critique further and think through what an impossible politic might mean for all bodies that are marked by various dominations emerging from race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability.The detached stance of the policy maker in debate divorces us from true advocacy. Simulations only serve to distance us from real world political participation. Controls the internal link to their abstraction bad arguments DSRB 08Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a “sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture.”115 In other words, its participants are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms like torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can only serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks: …the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were. The relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When we blithely call for United States Federal Government policymaking, we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that establishes our place on this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated everyday in our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these implications” (emphasis in original).116 The “objective” stance of the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist persona. The policymaker relies upon “acceptable” forms of evidence, engaging in logical discussion, producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters’ note, such a stance is integrally linked to the normative, historical and contemporary practices of power that produce and maintain varying networks of oppression. In other words, the discursive practices of policy oriented debate are developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege. Thus, these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony. So, rather than seeing themselves as government or state actors, Jones and Green choose to perform themselves in debate, violating the more “objective” stance of the “policymaker” and require their opponents to do the same. Jones and Green argue that debaters should ground their agency in what they are able to do as “individuals.” Note the following statement from Green in the 2NC against Emory’s Allen and Greenstein (ranked in the “sweet sixteen”): “And then, another main difference is that our advocacy is grounded in our agency as individuals. Their agency is grounded in what the US federal government, what the state should do.”117 Citing Mitchell, Green argues further: We talk about, dead prez, talks about how the system ain’t gone change, unless we make it change. We’re talkin’ about what we as individuals should do. That’s why Gordon Mitchell talked about how when we lose our argumentative agency. When we give our agency to someone else, we begin speaking of what the United States Federal Government should do, rather than what we do, that cause us to be spectators. Its one of the most debilitating failures of contemporary education.118 As part of their commitment to the development of agency, each of the Louisville debaters engages in a recognition of their privilege, in an attempt to make their social locations visible and relevant to their rhetorical stance.A2 PermsCooption DA – perms commodify and co-opt resistance – police at gay rights marches - the state will coopt any radical resistance – Lamble says that the state joins hands with the privileged minorities and positions itself as the protector which only reinscribes state power – this is still incorporation and means you take everything that was good about the alt and corrupt it by forcing recognition by the state. Footnoting DA – you add on the alternative to the aff to take the focus away from the liminal spaces of the not quit human which prevents any chance of alt solvency – the alt forces us to look and learn from those spaces but also looking at dominant spaces obscures liminal spaces. Links are DAsA2 Perm do the aff and the alt in all other instancesThis is intrinsic – we advocate for our alt in this round so this perm is your advocacy plus adding on the alt in all other instances – reject intrinsic perms, kills neg strategy because you’ll add on a plank to solve literally any DA – fairness matters, debate is a competitive activity Wehelieye 3 says we must reject all instances of the European Man or else it will contain to categorize beings and force our speech to be intelligible – means doing it even once kills alternative solvency A2 NB = No static methodThis just makes no sense – habeas viscus doesn’t say “staticizing methods is bad”, it says the static idea of the European man is badA2 K and PIC contradict Now on the debate over whether the PIC is contradictory with the K—The only way that the PIC can contradict the Kritik is if the PIC attempting to incproate marginalized bodies within the institution of the University. Habeas Viscus is a conceptual crticisim of the aff’s methodology whereby the affirmative commits to incorporating marginalized bodies within a certain community, i.e. the university. The K explains that this is bad because it necessitates a category of beings who aren’t worthy of being recognized. Compare that to the PIC—it says nothing about including voices or incorporating bodies into legal personhood, just that NCID and psychological violence are bad things. We do not say that survivors of NCID should go take specific actions or pursue legal rectification, which would be the only way the PIC contradicts the K. Also, worst case for me is that I lose the K debate, but that does not lose me the round because losing the K debate just means that role playing as the government is good and that legal incorporation is good, but the PIC still functions on that layer and explains that even under the aff’s method, the PIC is the optimal strategy for roleplaying/incproation. LinksRationality Rationality necessitates a view from nowhere which prevent embodied experience and can’t resolve oppression. Western rationality is a social construct created around the dichotomy between rational whiteness and irrational ‘savagery’ of non white people. Kincheloe 99{Joe L; Research chair at Faculty of Education at McGill University; “The Struggle to Define and Reinvent Whiteness: A Pedagogical Analysis”; College Literature 26 (Fall 1999): 162-; 1999; (spring%2001)/articles/kincheloe.html; accessed 9/22/16}AvPWhile no one knows exactly what constitutes whiteness, we can historicize the concept and offer some general statements about the dynamics it signifies. Even this process is difficult, as whiteness as a socio-historical construct is constantly shifting in light of new circumstances and changing interactions with various manifestations of power. With these qualifications in mind we believe that a dominant impulse of whiteness took shape around the European Enlightenment’s notion of rationality with its privileged construction of a transcendental white, male, rational subject who operated at the recesses of power while concurrently giving every indication that he escaped the confines of time and space. In this context whiteness was naturalized as a universal entity that operated as more than a mere ethnic positionality emerging from a particular time, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a particular space, Western Europe. Reason in this historical configuration is whitened and human nature itself is grounded upon this reasoning capacity. Lost in the defining process is the socially constructed nature of reason itself, not to mention its emergence as a signifier of whiteness. Thus, in its rationalistic womb whiteness begins to establish itself as a norm that represents an authoritative, delimited, and hierarchical mode of thought. In the emerging colonial contexts in which Whites would increasingly find themselves in the decades and centuries following the Enlightenment, the encounter with non-Whiteness would be framed in rationalistic terms - whiteness representing orderliness, rationality, and self-control and non-whiteness as chaos, irrationality, violence, and the breakdown of self-regulation. Rationality emerged as the conceptual base around which civilization and savagery could be delineated (Giroux 1992; Alcoff 1995; Keating 1995). This rationalistic modernist whiteness is shaped and confirmed by its close association with science. As a scientific construct whiteness privileges mind over body, intellectual over experiential ways of knowing, mental abstractions over passion, bodily sensations, and tactile understanding (Semali and Kincheloe 1999; Kincheloe, Steinberg, and Hinchey 1999). In the study of multicultural education such epistemological tendencies take on dramatic importance. In educators’ efforts to understand the forces that drive the curriculum and the purposes of Western education, modernist whiteness is a central player. The insight it provides into the social construction of schooling, intelligence, and the disciplines of psychology and educational psychology in general opens a gateway into white consciousness and its reactions to the world around it. Objectivity and dominant articulations of masculinity as signs of stability and the highest expression of white achievement still work to construct everyday life and social relations at the end of the twentieth century. Because such dynamics have been naturalized and universalized, whiteness assumes an invisible power unlike previous forms of domination in human history. Such an invisible power can be deployed by those individuals and groups who are able to identify themselves within the boundaries of reason and to project irrationality, sensuality, and spontaneity on to the other. Thus, European ethnic groups such as the Irish in nineteenth-century industrializing America were able to differentiate themselves from passionate ethnic groups who were supposedly unable to regulate their own emotional predispositions and gain a rational and objective view of the world. Such peoples - who were being colonized, exploited, enslaved, and eliminated by Europeans during their Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment eras - were viewed as irrational and, thus, inferior in their status as human beings. As inferior beings, they had no claim to the same rights as Europeans - hence, white racism and colonialism were morally justified around the conflation of whiteness and reason. In order for whiteness to place itself in the privileged seat of rationality and superiority, it would have to construct pervasive portraits of non-Whites, Africans in particular, as irrational, disorderly, and prone to uncivilized behavior (Nakayama and Krizek 1995; Stowe 1996; Alcoff 1995; Haymes 1996). As rock of rationality in a sea of chaos and disorder, whiteness presented itself as a non-colored, non-blemished pure category. Even a mere drop of non-white blood was enough historically to relegate a person to the category of "colored." Being white, thus, meant possessing the privilege of being uncontaminated by any other bloodline. A mixed race child in this context has often been rejected by the white side of his or her heritage - the rhetorical construct of race purity demands that the mixed race individual be identified by allusion to the non-white group, for example, she’s half Latina or half Chinese. Individuals are rarely half-white. As Michel Foucault often argued, reason is a form of disciplinary power. Around Foucault’s axiom, critical multiculturalists contend that reason can never be separated from power. Those without reason defined in the Western scientific way are excluded from power and are relegated to the position of unreasonable other. Whites in their racial purity understood the dictates of the "White Man’s Burden" and became the beneficent teachers of the barbarians. To Western eyes the contrast between white and non-white culture was stark: reason as opposed to ignorance; scientific knowledge instead of indigenous knowledge; philosophies of mind versus folk psychologies; religious truth in lieu of primitive superstition; and professional history as opposed to oral mythologies. Thus, rationality was inscribed in a variety of hierarchical relations between European colonizers and their colonies early on, and between Western multinationals and their "underdeveloped" markets in later days. Such power relations were erased by the white claim of cultural neutrality around the transhistorical norm of reason - in this construction rationality was not assumed to be the intellectual commodity of any specific culture. Indeed, colonial hierarchies immersed in exploitation were justified around the interplay of pure whiteness, impure non-whiteness, and neutral reason. Traditional colonialism was grounded on colonialized people’s deviation from the norm of rationality, thus making colonization a rational response to inequality. In the twentieth century this white norm of rationality was extended to the economic sphere where the philosophy of the free market and exchange values were universalized into signifiers of civilization. Once all the nations on earth are drawn into the white reason of the market economy, then all land can be subdivided into real estate, all human beings’ worth can be monetarily calculated, values of abstract individualism and financial success can be embraced by every community in every country, and education can be reformulated around the cultivation of human capital. When these dynamics come to pass, the white millennium will have commenced - white power will have been consolidated around land and money. The Western ability to regulate diverse peoples through their inclusion in data banks filled with information about their credit histories, institutional affiliations, psychological "health," academic credentials, work experiences, and family backgrounds will reach unprecedented levels. The accomplishment of this ultimate global colonial task will mark the end of white history in the familiar end-of-history parlance. This does not mean that white supremacy ends, but that it has produced a hegemony so seamless that the need for further structural or ideological change becomes unnecessary. The science, reason, and technology of white culture will have achieved their inevitable triumph (MacCannell 1992; Nakayama and Krizek 1995; Alcoff 1995; Giroux 1992). Whatever the complexity of the concept, whiteness, at least one feature is discernible - whiteness cannot escape the materiality of its history, its effects on the everyday lives of those who fall outside its conceptual net as well as on white people themselves. Critical scholarship on whiteness should focus attention on the documentation of such effects. Whiteness study in a critical multiculturalist context should delineate the various ways such material effects shape cultural and institutional pedagogies and position individuals in relation to the power of white reason. Understanding these dynamics is central to the curriculums of black studies, Chicano studies, postcolonialism, indigenous studies, not to mention educational reform movements in elementary, secondary, and higher education. The history of the world’s diverse peoples in general as well as minority groups in Western societies in particular has often been told from a white historiographical perspective. Such accounts erased the values, epistemologies, and belief systems that grounded the cultural practices of diverse peoples. Without such cultural grounding students have often been unable to appreciate the manifestations of brilliance displayed by non-white cultural groups. Caught in the white interpretive filter they were unable to make sense of diverse historical and contemporary cultural productions as anything other than proof of white historical success. The fact that one of the most important themes of the last half of the twentieth century - the revolt of the "irrationals" against white historical domination - has not been presented as a salient part of the white (or non-white) story is revealing, a testimony to the continuing power of whiteness and its concurrent fragility (Banfield 1991; Frankenberg 1993; Stowe 1996; Vattimo 1992).SurveillanceThe affirmative’s over focus on technological surveillance ignores the assemblage that is the surveillance state – this essentialism, in effect, turns all of their arguments about gridding as they can only ever understand identity and power through the lens of biometrics –Puar 07 Jasbir Puar, Associate Professor of Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times” Duke University Press, November 2007,Sunaina Maira writes of Muslim communities in the greater Boston area, ‘‘There is . . . a heightened sense of fear and vulnerability . . . particularly among working-class immigrants who cannot as easily afford legal counsel if they are harassed or detained. . . . It would not be too dramatic to say that many in these communities feel under siege.’’ She argues that another byproduct of the NSEERS program entails the manufacture of a population living in the shadows, a ‘‘subliminal and precarious world of individuals who cannot fully admit they exist.’’ The ephemera of control simulates homologous affects and intensities as detention: fear, anxiety, discomfort, disorientation, uncertainty, despair, anger, vertigo, nausea. (We can ponder the bountiful palimpsest: policing activist events and activists themselves, patrolling educational sectors and academic freedom of speech, the surge of video surveillance in public arenas.) As Judith Butler wonders, ‘‘What kind of public culture is being created when a certain ‘indefinite containment’ takes place outside the prison walls, on the subway, in the airports, on the street, in the workplace?’’ ∞≠Ω But the metaphor of containment is not quite right, for there is mass distribution of these ‘‘technologies of suspicion’’; hence the sliding between indefinite and infinite detention. Silence, then, the silence of a discordant American citizenry, or the silence (relative to the historical and the geographical) of U.S. antiwar protests, or the silence of the academy, or the silence of people of color and immigrants, undocumented or not: these silences not only point to political apathy, defeatism, denial, or detachment, but also to the workings of control that surpass the walls of detention. Another symptom of societal control is that those who are not silent— global protests, alternative media, resistant strands of politics— are rarely heard, seen, or responded to by the state, in part because the apparatuses of control diffuse the state as the regulatory center of control. The vacating of entire predominantly Muslim neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, Detroit, Boston, and other cities suggests that the means of control bleed far beyond the disciplinary apparatus of the prison. That is, the affects of detention are mimicked in public spheres. Indeed, detention sites themselves have become sites of activism and protest, along with antiwar protests, and thus of expanded surveillance, while the administrative control tool of the ‘‘list’’ is an accomplice to forcible detention and deportation; in actuality, the list brings much better results than direct policing. The NSEERS program aggregates national, religious, ethnic, and racial identities from subjects to populations; that is, the ‘‘Muslim population’’ or the ‘‘terrorist look-alike’’ population is collected as a target (the targeting happening through the collecting) of these regulations as are those who fall outside these parameters or could perform as if outside these parameters. Data Bodies The security of biopolitics is precisely this challenge of managing a network of bodies, data, and their interlinkages— travel advisories, global health alerts, emergency-response protocols, selective quarantines, high-tech diagnostics, and the medical and economic assertion of newer and better prescription drugs. The problem of security for biopolitics is the problem of creating boundaries that are selectively permeable.—Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome intimate control, infinite detention Dismayingly, the TIA [the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness] panel reverentially quotes Michel Foucault, one of the biggest academic frauds of the late twentieth century, for the proposition that ‘‘ ‘modern society increasingly functions like a super Panopticon [prison watchtower] in which government constrains individual behavior by the threat of surveillance.’’ One should hope that this is the first and last time that a Defense Department advisory board has invoked Foucault, since this French poseur, who presented Western culture as one big plot to suppress dissent, difference, and minority rights, has less than nothing to contribute to the national defense. Like Foucault, who never troubled himself with evidence, the Washington wise men offer no backup for their claim that government increasingly ‘‘constrains individual behavior by the threat of surveillance.’’—Heather MacDonald ‘‘What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us’’ The ‘‘technological sublime’’ refers to the totalizing, overarching, and inflated power falsely accorded to surveillance, hyperbole that conveniently forgets that interactions between user and interface are often consensual, that security and information systems often fail in their objectives, and that control does not always espouse or shape value systems. I turn now to a preliminary sketch of surveillance technologies to construct a perfunctory understanding of intimacy and security within control societies. I am not interested in appraising the relative intrusiveness or privacy-hindering effects of surveillance. More significant is that the perception of an all-encompassing, impenetrable, and infallible surveillance structure affectively breeds fear, terror, and insecurity. The private within rights discourses is overwhelmingly a ‘‘flat discourse. It largely ignores the vertical dimension and tends to look across rather than to cut through the landscape.’’ Eyal Weizman, through what he terms ‘‘the politics of verticality,’’ details the spatial reconceptualization of the shift from two-dimensional space— an expanse of horizontal and vertical coordinates, latitudinal and longitudinal positions, over here and over there, inside and out— to a three-dimensional space of volume, depth, and verticality. ∞∞≥ Addressing the flatness of mapping and its inaccuracy or inadequacy, the politics of verticality oscillates from representational space to informational space, from epistemological comprehensions of space to ontological presences and experiences. The variances between ‘‘looking across’’ and ‘‘cutting through’’ drive transformations in corporeal phenomena of space, territory, and occupation. Weizman’s point is that the penetrative force of surveillance is also vertical rather than only lateral, unaligned and punctuated by ‘‘kissing points’’ (a pleasant misnomer, lending a sweetness to it all) and other momentary contacts rather than invasion or gentrification. The politics of verticality transgresses a notion of panoptic surveillance enabled through the expanse of looking from above and beyond, able to witness the visibly aberrant body in question within the prescribed sites of deviance (for queers, especially gay men, this has conventionally meant cruising zones and gay neighborhoods) to thinking about networks of contact and control, of circuits that cut through. ∞∞? Networks of surveillance in this three-dimensional, vertical setup are not removed, abstract, or cohered, but viciously intimate: unlike the apartheid of separation, these ‘‘new and intricate frontiers’’ invented for domination demand intimacy, not just penetration but interpenetration, matrices of scalar layers that are discontinuous yet transversal. They are discontinuous in that intimate proximities are orchestrated to produce the ephemera of nonconnection, of not-touching— not through a vacuum of distance or of severing or separation, but in the proactive, provocative swerve away from contact, the refusal of tactile knowing; the discontinuity is a deliberate rupturing, not simply a missing or a missed connection, but an intimate, brutal, almost-but-no kind of taunting. Intimacy in biopolitical terms is not bound to protection in the private or exposure in public. It mediates relations between transparency and opacity, waves of proximity, observation and invisibility, gazes, traces and profiles, electric and erotic charges, passing by and bypassing, tightness, looseness, comfort, orderliness and chaos, order and disarray, rubbing and brushing against. Control networks are systems of unleashed circuitry, exuberant, fertile, that taunt the boundaries of inside and outside and, more important, beginning and end. Legislation after September 11, 2001, exacerbated an already occurring blurring of the dissimilarities between law enforcement and intelligence. The former is a reactive activity, the purpose of which is ‘‘to capture and prosecute criminals.’’ Intelligence, on the other hand, is proactive, ‘‘collected for the prevention of, and warning about, national security threats,’’ allowing for the ‘‘government mining of third-party private transactional data,’’ easing barriers in obtaining ‘‘warrants for electronic surveillance,’’ and permitting the ‘‘FBI to collect public information . . . and conduct surveillance in public places absent to a link to suspected criminal activity.’’ ∞∞∏ What we also see is a profound sway in the tenor of temporality: the realignment from reactive to preemptive is a conversion from past tense subject formation to future-tense subject anticipation, from the rehabilitative subject whose violated rights can be redressed through social representation and legal recognition, to regenerative populations who are culled through anticipation. Felix Stalder observes, ‘‘Our bodies are being shadowed by an increasingly comprehensive ‘data body.’ However, this shadow body does more than follow us. It does also precede us,’’ lurking as an ‘‘informational doppelganger.’’ Systems such as the Department of Defense’s Total Information Awareness enable mining ‘‘transactional data’’ to locate ‘‘patterns of terrorist activity.’’ Creating ratings of mobility risk naturally favors ‘‘ ‘low risk’ frequent travelers’’ through ‘‘smart border’’ agreements. Such pacts include the Secure Electronic Network for Travelers’ Rapid Inspection system (at the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego); the Free and Secure Trade program (easing truck congestion at border points for human as well as nonhuman entities); Nexus (at the U.S.-Canada border, as well as, in the future, the Ottawa and Montreal international airports); and the Immigration and Naturalization Service Passenger Accelerated Service System (in six U.S. airports, including Los Angeles International). A ‘‘trusted travelers’’ database allows selected individuals to bypass regular security lines. ∞∞Ω The Transportation Security Agency’s Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II project is designed to ‘‘profile prospective airline passengers using commercial databases.’’ ∞≤≠ Identity recognition technologies involve biometric facial and iris recognition; hand geometry recognition; ‘‘electronic body scanner[s] that sees through clothing’’; and the Human Identification at a Distance system that ‘‘identifies an individual’s unique walking style and gestures.’’ ∞≤∞ A ‘‘virtual borders’’ program commissioned by the government and developed by Accenture aims to standardize the use of biometric data not only at U.S. ports of entry but prior to departure, at the point of origination. Visa applicants will be screened through fingerprinting and again upon departure from the origin country to the United States, the goal being to make ‘‘technology and information systems the first line of defense, and allow U.S. border inspectors to become the last line of defense.’’ A description of the program is as follows: ‘‘Virtual borders of the United States would extend to the point of origination for visitors. The bulk of the security checks will be performed at the time of application for a visa to visit the United States.’’ ∞≤≤ These ‘‘surveillant assemblages,’’ invested in witnessing the mobility of human and nonhuman actors, as well as affectively undulating movement itself, create the sameness of population through democratization of monitoring at the same time they enable and solidify hierarchies— in other words, the circuit amid profiling and racial profiling. ∞≤≥ Despite reports that terrorist circles are recruiting non-Arabs and non– South Asians who can pass and thus carry out attacks, racial profiling continues to be an important security measure. ∞≤? Yet unlike an older ‘‘masculinism as protection’’ model of surveillance, whereby ‘‘patriarchal logic . . . gives to protective services a right to rule over those who count on their expertise at keeping watch and apprehending,’’ in the move from the containment and normativization of the subject to the control of populations (here we must perpetually drag ourselves from the subject as an object of inquiry, if only for a moment), self-regulation becomes less an internalization of norms and more about constant monitoring of oneself and others, watching, waiting, listening, ordering, positioning, calculating. One sees emerging through these practices not necessarily the crafting of the individual subject cohered through acquiescence to or internalization of norms but assemblages of ‘‘militarized bodies.’’ As John Armitage explains, these comprise ‘‘an assortment of practices consisting of the conversion of civilian bodies to military use and the inculcation into such bodies of military principals.’’ ∞≤∏ Militarized bodies arise from both conventional nationstate militaries and their supraand subnational counterparts (militias, paramilitary groups) and also through technologies that produce zones where ‘‘the ‘redundant’ population . . . rubs shoulders with the ‘useful’ and ‘legitimate’ rest.’’ ∞≤π In the context of civilians who have no direct links with conventionally defined military spaces, the force of mobilization takes on a different role. Going beyond meaning or interpretations of bodies in the military, militarization is produced through flows of information and series of activities, the everyday activities of civilians that participate in and contribute to the military complex. These vectors of militarization that permeate the everyday once again produce public spheres where many affects of detention cells are mimicked. Thus, militarization is not only heightened and intensified, not only expanded in expanse or range; in constellation fashion, it is disseminated precisely and insidiously, from bodies to entertainment to consumption. Militarized bodies are crafted through the dissemination and diffusion of control, rather than within concentrated and isolated patches of discipline or via overt methods of force. These networks of control are distributed and interactive, intent on mobilizing the populace: participation is therefore a patriotic mandate. AfropessThe aff is a structuralist political ontology which situates blackness as a static position forced from the outside – this is a concession to systems of domination which reinforces a sad affect and eradicates the truly dangerous power of blackness: becomingKoerner 12In “The Case of Blackness” Moten (2008b: 187) perceptively remarks, “What is inadequate to blackness is already given ontologies.” What if we were to think of blackness as a name for an ontology of becoming? How might such a thinking transform our understanding of the relation of blackness to history and its specific capacity to “think [its] way out of the exclusionary constructions” of history and the thinking of history (Moten 2008a: 1744)? Existing ontologies tend to reduce blackness to a historical condition, a “lived experience,” and in doing so effectively eradicate its unruly character as a transformative force. Deleuze and Guattari, I think, offer a compelling way to think of this unruliness when they write, “What History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self- positing as concept, escapes History” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110). To bring this relation between blackness and becoming further into the open — toward an affirmation of the unexpected insinuation of blackness signaled by the use of Jackson’s line as an “event in its becoming” — a few more words need be said about Deleuze’s method. The use of Jackson’s writing is just one instance of a procedure that we find repeated throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where we constantly encounter unexpected injections of quotations, names, and ideas lifted from other texts, lines that appear all of sudden as though propelled by their own force. One might say they are deployed rather than explained or interpreted; as such, they produce textual events that readers may choose to ignore or pick up and run with. Many names are proposed for this method — “schizoanalysis, micropolitics, pragmatics, diagrammatism, rhizomatics, cartography” (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 94) — but the crucial issue is to affirm an experimental practice that opposes itself to the interpretation of texts, proposing instead that we think of a book as “a little machine” and ask “what it functions with, in connection with what other things does it or does it not transmit intensities?” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 4).8 Studying how Soledad Brother functions in Deleuze’s books, connecting Jackson’s line to questions and historical issues that are not always explicitly addressed in those books, involves one in this action. And further, it opens new lines where the intensities transmitted in Jackson’s book make a claim on our own practice. This method can be seen as an effort to disrupt the hierarchical opposition between theory and practice and to challenge some of the major assumptions of Western Marxism. In an interview with Antonio Negri in the 1990s, Deleuze (1997: 171) clarifies that he and Guattari have “remained Marxists” in their concern to analyze the ways capitalism has developed but that their political philosophy makes three crucial distinctions with respect to more traditional theoretical approaches: first, a thinking of “war machines” as opposed to state theory; second, a “consideration of minorities rather than classes”; and finally, the study of social “lines of flight” rather than the interpretation and critique of social contradictions. Each of these distinctions, as we will see, resonates with Jackson’s political philosophy, but as the passage from Anti-Oedipus demonstrates, the concept of the “line of flight” emerges directly in connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s encounter with Soledad Brother. The concept affirms those social constructions that would neither be determined by preexisting structures nor caught in a dialectical contradiction. It names a force that is radically autonomous from existing ontologies, structures, and historical accounts. It is above all for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari insist that society be thought of not as a “structure” but as a “machine,” because such a concept enables the thinking of the movements, energies, and intensities (i.e., the lines of flight) that such machines transmit. The thinking of machines forces us not only to consider the social and historical labor involved in producing society but also the ongoing potentials of constructing new types of assemblages (agencement). One of the key adversaries of this machinic approach is “interpretation” and more specifically structuralist interpretations of society in terms of contradictions. According to Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 293), structuralism persisted in the “submission of the line to the point” and as a result produced a theory of subjectivity, and also an account of language and the unconscious, that could not think in terms of movement and construction. Defining lines only in relation to finite points (the subject, the signifier) produces a calculable grid, a structure that then appears as the hidden intelligibility of the system and of society generally. Louis Althusser’s account of the “ideological State apparatus” as the determining structure of subjectivity is perhaps the extreme expression of this gridlocked position (an example we will come back to in a later section). Opposed to this theoretical approach, diagrammatism (to invoke one of the terms given for this method) maps vectors that generate an open space and the potentials for giving consistency to the latter.9 In other words, rather than tracing the hidden structures of an intolerable system, Deleuze and Guattari’s method aims to map the ways out of it.The relationship of negativity resurrects the most violent forms of humanism by defining blackness in opposition to civil society and serves only to banish the positive beauty of blackness that the affirmative attempts to reclaimLarue 11By trying to uncover a human ontology, humanism underscores the necessity and value of “knowing” origins. Origins, to date, have been used as principles by which things, objects, and people can be grouped and segregated. Questions such as “where are your people from?” or “where are you from?” seek origins so that the speaker can be lumped into a group, which is usually pre-established as either “acceptable” (Western European) or “unacceptable” (all others). While this is a gross oversimplification of categories, it does serve to show how determining ontological roots affects human society. Not only did Descartes? cogito renew a desire to find the origins of human existence, but it set the origins of the human within the confines of its own mind—in the human?s ability (or lack thereof) to reason. This practice both set the stage for understanding existence through a reliance on reason and provided a “reasonable” justification for an exclusion of all those beings who, according to the Enlightenment model of the human, could not demonstrate reason. Since colonized individuals did not effectively demonstrate “Enlightenment” reason, they were effectively considered outside of European humanity. Apart from this, setting up this “foundation” for human existence proves troubling because the very concept of a foundation—structurally speaking—seeks to dislocate bodies from the rest of the world. Foundations set apart, and isolate, all that is built on their perimeter. It limits what can and cannot be established, killing off all roots--or histories--and establishing itself as the origin of the order. Ironically, as they convey a desire to unite multiple elements into one single structure (just as the foundation of a house attempts to bring together all of the parts of the house, from the wood used to construct spaces, to the spaces themselves), foundations are based on a system of “is/is not.” Because they are finite regions, they always exclude. Seeking a “foundational” humanity, then, sets up an understanding of the human that requires exclusions and boundaries. So far, this desire for a foundational humanity is what has limited much expansion of the concept of what it means to be “human.” In order for humanity to progress beyond the point of a binarized logic of either/or this concept of a “foundation” of human existence must be eradicated. Since its inception, the Cartesian division (of mind and body, or reason and form) has become the cornerstone for definitions of humanity. However, if, as Bart Simon argues, “the revolutionary Enlightenment narratives” of the human reestablished the foundations of the human and “challenged an oppressive feudal order and reenvisioned [sic] ?man? as rational, autonomous, unique, and free” (4), it only did so for a small sector of humanity. As focusing on the “feudal order” left many other sectors of humanity untouched and without vision, it served to both turn the human into a product of politics and economics by expanding the population of humanity based on ownership rights. And, as Susan Bordo argues, the Cartesian model presents problems for humanity because it “is nothing if not a passion for separation, purification, and demarcation,” where the body is separated from the mind (17). Acting as the scalpel, Descartes? reliance--or, perhaps more appropriately, his insistence—on reason further complicates the question of “what is human” since, in an attempt to form “a unified system of absolute knowledge” (4), the model further divided human existence within the world, and placed humanity further at odds with the rest of the world (4). Instead of uniting humanity, the Cartesian “Man” was now limited to white males who could reason and who could, with this reason, properly make use of the environment; or, in other words, at this point, another classification of the human was established based on “his” ability to subjugate “his” environment and all that existed (without Enlightenment approved reason) within it.6 Origins became tied to European reason, and, in doing this, denied all non-Europeans access to ontology. It is from this point—from an attempt to enter the “body” of humanity—that Fanon’s humanism seems to stem Fanon’s cries for seeing the “equality of all men in the world” (Black Skin 110) based on their ability to rationalize it (123) show him continually trying to climb onto, and establish residency on this “revolutionary” foundation of humanity. By clinging to the already troubled concept of a “foundational” humanness, Fanon seems to ignore the fact that this “all-inclusive” humanity is established on principles of exclusion and can never be entered as long as the system remains intact. Fanon troubles a potentially fruitful argument on postcolonial existence because he, as many of his predecessors, attempts to focus on the origins of postcolonial individuals—looking to the ideologies of the colonizer as the point of this origin—and, all the while further grounding a postcolonial future within the colonial situation. If postcoloniality is forever a “descendent” of colonization, it can never move beyond exclusion because it is always defined as exclusion. For postcolonialism alone, this is an arduous—and perhaps impossible—task. However, by “reading” postcoloniality as part of what Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a rhizome (6), it is possible to break Fanon?s postcolonial search for reclaiming an origin, and allow for an understanding of “self” that does not predicate itself upon the rationalization of existence, but on the understanding and appreciation of interconnections of existence. In order to move beyond the effects of colonization, postcoloniality can no longer afford to be seen as a “product of” colonization—or white European actions. It must be understood on different terms.? While it must be noted that posthumanism— much like postcolonialism—is an academic endeavor, the field’s importance comes in its insistence that, as Myra Seaman phrases it, “there has never been one unified, cohesive ‘human’” (246-47). The “human” derived from European humanism have been nothing more than, to quote N. Katherine Hayles, a labels knighted upon a “fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice” (286). It is in this attempt to rethink human relationships not only with the environment but with other human bodies, and ultimately redefine what it means to be human from a more “global” perspective that possible strategies for rethinking postcoloniality arise. Because it emphasizes “deterritorializations” and “reterritorializations” (Deleuze and Guattari 10) the rhizome offers a break from an understanding of the human as a “point” to be entered. As “there are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root” (8) the idea that the human has a point of origin, and that, in postcoloniality, European culture is the postcolonial?s point of origin can be discarded. What, instead, the rhizome makes available are a multiplicity of lines (8) which can be understood as continuous forms. This is important because, “reading” postcoloniality as part a rhizome means understanding that there was existence before, through, and after the events of colonization, therefore separating the origins of postcolonial individuals from those of the colonizer. A separation in this way restores “validity” to the existence of the postcolonial, removes the concept of victimhood—or victimization—and sets the understanding that not all contact is—although there may at times be horrific incidents, or periods—negative.? In addition to this, since rhizomes are multiplicities (of lines, no less) and seek—unlike Fanon—to do away with the concept of “unity,” since unity “always operates in an empty dimension supplementary to that of the system considered (overcoding)” (8), there no longer exists a need for postcolonial individuals to desire to ascend the hierarchy established by colonization. Postcoloniality, as a rhizome, no longer needs to enter into the humanity of the colonizer because, as a rhizome, it is allowed—no, it is necessary—to be apart from the other. As a rhizome they remain connected. Moreover, redefining the human in terms of a posthuman-postcoloniality allows for the possibility of opening all sectors of humanity so that the human is understood as a nexus rather than a solid form. Still, much work is needed in order to more fully understand postcoloniality as rhizomatic. As established, postcoloniality includes not only the physical, political, economic, and social modes of postcolonized individuals, but at the heart of these modes rests a linguistic model that establishes the “presence” of individuals. This presence works in two parts: first it establishes a vacuum in which it can place its subject, and it then institutes them as European-style individuals.BiopowerStates of exception aren’t created equal – the 1AC’s insists that power operates through the collapse of legal caesuras, which normalizes the production of extra-legal racializing assemblages and ignores that the hieroglyphics of the flesh need no legal qualifications to functionWeheliye 14 Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, 2014, “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human,”Because the dossier is so limited in scope and in order to bring Benjamin into the Schmittian fold, Agamben takes it upon himself to revise the text of Origin as it appears in the German edition of Benjamin’s collected works: “An unfortunate emendation in the text of the Gesammelte Schriften has prevented all the implications of this shift from being assessed. Where Benjamin’s text read, Es gibt eine barocke Eschatologie , ‘there is a baroque eschatology,’ the editors, with a singular disregard for all philological care, have corrected it to read: Es gibt keine . . . ‘there is no baroque eschatology’” (State of Exception , 56). According to Rolf Tiedemann, the editor of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften , this particular amendment is based on contextual conjecture, as are other editorial changes, since Benjamin states at several other points in the text that the German baroque was characterized by an absence of eschatology, for instance: “the baroque knows no eschatology” and “the rejection of the eschatology of the religious dramas is characteristic of the new drama throughout Europe.” 37 The problem lies not so much in Agamben’s linking of Schmitt’s and Benjamin’s ideas, but rather in the alacrity with which he postulates direct historical connections between these two thinkers. These philological canards become indicative of Agamben’s overall appropriation of Benjamin, which has at its goal the annexing— by any means necessary— of Benjamin into the mainstream at the cost of disregarding Benjamin’s liminal status in Germany during his lifetime; it also downplays both the Marxist elements, as fractured as they may have been, and those aspects regarding the revolutionary potentiality of the oppressed in Benjamin’s philosophy. As a result, the homo sacer’s social death appears as the only feature of his or her subjectivity. Taking in other instantiations of mere life such as colonialism, racial slavery, or indigenous genocide opens up a sociopolitical sphere in which different modalities of life and death, power and oppression, pain and pleasure, inclusion and exclusion form a continuum that embody the hidden and not-so-veiled matrices of contemporary sovereignty. Agamben’s dogmatic insistence on a stringently juridical instantiation of the state of exception reinstitutes the Holocaust as the most severe and paradigmatic manifestation of bare life (here bolstered by a legal rather than moral frame of reference), and this argument also neglects forms of bare life that take place within the jurisdiction of the normal legal order. This reliance on a dogmatic conception of not only the state of exception but law in general materializes in Agamben’s discussion of incarceration. Contra Foucault, Agamben excludes the prison from the state of exception, and thus the production of bare life, because it forms a part of penal law and not martial law (the state of exception) and is therefore legally within “the normal order.” The camp, on the other hand, represents the absolute space of exception, which is “topologically different from a simple space of confinement” ( Homo Sacer , 20). 38 But as Angela Davis and Colin Dayan, among others, have shown, the violent practices in U.S. prisons neither deviate significantly from Agamben’s description of bare life vis-à-vis the suspension of law nor are mere spaces of detention. 39 Dayan explicitly addresses the continuities between slavery, imprisonment, and the torture in the Abu Ghraib prison through an excavation of the various interpretations of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, especially the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment,” which has been evacuated of its meaning by locating its significance solely in relation to the intent of the perpetrator. 40 In Angela Davis’s observation, torture suffuses everyday life in the United States and abroad: “The military detention center as a site of torture and repression does not, therefore, displace domestic supermaximum security prison. . . . My point is that the normalization of torture, the everydayness of torture that is characteristic of the supermax may have a longer staying power than the outlaw military prison.” 41 Slavery, imprisonment, and torture, in U.S. prisons and abroad, are legal in the strict sense and very much part of the “normal order.” Still they display many of the same features Agamben ascribes to the camp as the definitive site for the production of bare life. If we take into account the racial dimensions of the U.S. penal system, imprisonment, and torture in their full juridical and cultural normalness, it would seem that racial violence is always already beyond the law under a constant state of siege. In other words, the normal order is differentially and hierarchically structured and does not necessitate a legal state of exception in order to fabricate the mere life of those subjects already marked for violent exclusion; in fact, we might even say that this is its end goal. In the contemporary United States, the prison-industrial complex functions as a racializing assemblage that dysselects black and Latino[/a] subjects, branding them with the hieroglyphics of the flesh. In this way, blackness and racism figure as major zones of indistinction: blackness as a vital (nonlegal) state of exception in the domain of modern humanity. Which is to say, the judicial machine is instantiated differentially according to various hierarchical structures and frequently abandons numerous subjects, making them susceptible to premature death within the scope of the normal order, which, in turn, aids in the creation and maintenance of caesura among humans. Instead of being seduced by the supposed omniscience of the law, we should ask, as Dayan does, “what does the law mask?” to underscore what remains “rotten at the core of the law” (Benjamin) or its “bare-faced two-facedness” (Spillers), especially for the oppressed. Agamben goes to great lengths to show that the political tools of subjection developed during the Holocaust were not simply blunders in the progressive march of western modernity. The Holocaust provides such an apt formation for Agamben’s theorization of modern politics precisely because the Third Reich as a whole took place in a legal state of exception after the suspension of regular German law in 1933. 42 After Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, the Verordnung des Reichspr?sidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat and the Erm?chtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) were issued in February and March 1933 respectively, withdrawing most civil liberties from German citizens while granting the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ( nsdap) leadership almost unlimited powers in legislative, judicial, and executive matters. Since these edicts were not repealed until 1945, they established martial law (the state of exception) in effect for the duration of the Third Reich. Carl Schmitt has famously defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception,” which Agamben takes as his starting point for thinking about the field of politics. 43 Even though he claims that the state of exception cannot be conceptualized solely in legal terms, since it represents the juridical suspension of the law, Agamben insists, “a theory of the state of exception is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same time, abandons the living being to law” ( State of Exception , 1). Nevertheless, as several critics have noted, the state of exception does not apply equally to all, since the exclusion of and violence perpetrated against some groups is anchored in the law. In a salient piece about planetary violence and the emergence of disposable populations, Ronald Judy states, “They [cannot] be explained in terms of exception, because the conditions of their existence know no temporal limits nor result from crises of sovereignty. . . . The occurrence of violence associated with disposable populations is symptomatic of the irrelevance of the entire discourse of sovereignty to the current arrangements of power, except when it operates as a means of ‘effecting control over mortality’ and as ‘a way of exercising the right to kill.’” 44 As opposed to the temporally bound state of exception espoused by Agamben and Schmitt that revokes the legal entitlements of all citizens, here different populations— often racialized— are suspended in a perpetual state of emergency in which legal rituals stain dysselected individuals and groups with the hieroglyphics of the flesh. And, as evidenced in the prison-industrial complex, the pretense of juridical equality rarely abolishes selective legal insouciance or genocidal acts against those who have been touched by racializing assemblages of the flesh.The aff’s Foucaultian conception of power only naturalizes the power of racializing assemblages by presuming a Foucault’s biopower re-entrenches humanism - Eurocentric demarcation between the west and the rest and disavowing the sociogenetic character of racializationWeheliye 14 Alexander Weheliye, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, 2014, “Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human,”In the Society lectures Foucault defines biopolitics as the power of the European state to “make live and let die,” which begins to shatter the hitherto unitary body politic of European nations at the end of the eighteenth century and comes to fully engulf these societies that must be defended throughout the nineteenth century. 12 This is the moment in which politics takes hold of the biological and the biological health of the national population defines the exercise of state power; and, according to Foucault, it produces a “racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements, and its own products. This is the internal racism of permanent purification , and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization” ( Society, 60). Careful to establish that racism preexists this moment, even though both its quality and primary function shift, Foucault shows how racism “had already been in existence for a very long time. But I think it functioned elsewhere [ Je ne veux pas dire du tout que le racisme a été inventé à cette époque. Il existait depuis bien longtemps. Mais je crois qu’il fonctionnait ailleurs ]” ( Society , 254/214). Racism, which up to this point had led a peaceful conceptual and historical life in an unspecified terra incognita, thus journeys from the uncharted periphery into the heart of the modern European nation-state. Yet despite locating the naissance of modern racism in “colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide” ( Society , 257), for Foucault, in a reversal of colonial modernity’s teleology that locates the temporal origin of all things in the west, racism only attains relevance once it penetrates the borders of fortress Europe. Even though the originating leap of racism can be found in the colonized “rest,” only its biopolitical rearticulation in the west imbues it with the magical aura of conceptual value. Because Foucault does not describe this ailleurs or even mention it again in the text, it materializes as a primitive topography, operating as a constitutive outside for his theory of biopolitics throughout these lectures. In logic, primitive terms or notions, also referred to as axioms or postulates, name instantly understandable terms that are used without elucidating their signification. The meanings of all other concepts in a logical system are determined by these primitive terms and by previously established expressions. Over the course of his argument about the genesis of biopolitics in the lectures, Foucault will continue to distinguish European state racism and biopolitics from those primeval forms of racism that linger in the aforementioned philosophical, geographical, and political quicksands of an unspecified elsewhere; at least, this is what we are asked to infer as a consequence of Foucault’s taciturnity about the reach and afterlife of those other modalities of racialization. In another context, Foucault defends the recurrent dearth of geographical specification in his oeuvre thus: “I don’t specify the space of reference more narrowly than that since it would be as warranted to say ‘I am speaking only of France’ as to say ‘I am talking about all of Europe.’ There is indeed a task to be done of making the space in question precise, saying where a certain process stops, what are the limits beyond which one could say ‘something different happens’—though this would have to be a collective undertaking.” 13 Alas, this collective undertaking has yet to be realized and it continues to be reproduced in contemporary biopolitics and bare life discourse. In several of the 1975– 76 lectures Foucault also employs the term colonization figuratively in order to ask whether there “isn’t a danger that they [our genealogical fragments] will be recoded, recolonized by these unitary discourses” ( Society , 11), to explain how madness and sexuality were “colonized and supported by global mechanisms and, finally, by the entire system of the State” (33), to demonstrate how “normalizing procedures are increasingly colonizing the procedures of the law” (38– 39), to argue that the Hegelian dialectic “be understood as philosophy and right’s colonization and authoritarian colonization of a historico-political discourse that was both a statement of fact, a proclamation, and a practice of social warfare” (58), and to show how the discourse of war was “restricted, colonized, settled, scattered, civilized if you like, and up to a point pacified” (215) within historical discourse at the close of the eighteenth century. The slippage between colonialism as a historical phenomenon and colonization as a synonym for hegemonic appropriation or annexation underscores the primitiveness of this concept in Foucault’s system of thought, in much the same way as the idea of ethnic racism, which I discuss shortly. That is, despite the fact that the histories of colonialism and racism secure Foucault’s definition of biopolitics, for Foucault the meaning of colonization and ethnic racism are immediately understandable, and as such they are exploited without the peripheral benefits of explication. More generally, Foucault positions biopolitics against rather simplified definitions of, on the one hand, an “ordinary racism . . . that takes the traditional form of mutual contempt or hatred between races” and, on the other, racism as an “ideological operation that allows States, or a class, to displace the hostility that is directed toward them . . . onto a mythical adversary” ( Society , 258). In its place, modern European racism provides a deeper domain, because it supplies the conditions of possibility for biopolitics, and although Foucault sees modern racism as originating in colonialism, he ultimately uses the Third Reich to illustrate the full reach of biopower when he writes, “of course, no state could have more disciplinary power than the Nazi regime. Nor was there any other State in which the biological was so tightly, so insistently, regulated” ( Society , 259). 14 We should remain vigilant about not acquiescing to these monumentalizing protocols (and Agamben’s) because, more often than not, they achieve their aggrandizing effect by not taking into account the historical relationality and conceptual contiguity between Nazi racism and the other forms of biopolitics I discussed earlier, those perfected in colonialism, indigenous genocide, racialized indentured servitude, and racial slavery, for instance. 15 They also discount discussions of those racializing assemblages that Foucault and Agamben consign to a theoretico-geographical no-Man’s-land. Moreover, given Foucault’s principal point about the overall pervasiness of biopolitics in Europe, why must its most severe incarnation bear the heavy burden of paradigmatic exemplariness, just as it does in Agamben? Why not simply examine the biopolitics of Nazi racism qua Nazi racism? Why must this form of racism necessarily figure as the apex in the telos of modern racializing assemblages? Even when considering modes of biopolitical racialization in the socialist state, Foucault’s interpretation hinges on setting it apart from a narrow definition of racism: “Quite naturally, we find that racism— not a truly ethnic racism [ le racisme proprement ethnique ] but racism of the evolutionist kind, biological racism— is fully operational in the way socialist States (of the Soviet Union type) deal with the mentally ill, criminals, political adversaries, and so on” ( Society , 261– 62/222). Initially, the caesura Foucault places between ethnic and biological racism seems to productively counteract some of his foregoing remarks about this question; at closer look, however, the distinction exposes the shortcomings of Foucault’s approach to race and racism. Because Foucault fails to probe the decidedly undemonic ground of his argument, he uncritically embraces an ontological differentiation between ethnic and biopolitical racism, leaving the door open for the naturalization of racial categories and the existence of a biological sphere that is not always already subject to ethnic racism. However, all modern racism is biological, first, because it maintains the believed natural— often evolutionary— inferiority of the targeted subjects and, second, because racialization is instituted, as elucidated by Wynter, in the realm of human physiology as the sociogenic selection of one specific group in the name of embodying all humanity. So rather than dysselecting phenotypically nonwhite or Jewish subjects, socialist biopower racializes sets of humans (criminals, dissidents, etc.) that are not distinctive in Man’s racial epidermal schema but are nevertheless classified as deviating from full (socialist) humans according to a preestablished pecking order that is deemed beyond the authority of human culture or politics. 16 Put bluntly, there exists no significant difference between ethnic and biological racism in the way Foucault imagines, since both rely on the same tools of trade: racializing assemblages. Nevertheless, it appears as if Foucault can only authenticate the uniqueness and novelty of European biopolitical racism by conjuring the antithetical spirits of racisms always already situated in a primitive elsewhere. Foucault concedes that the idea of race has no stable anchor in the biological; rather it names “a certain historico-political divide” in which “two races exist whenever one writes the history of two groups which do not, at least to begin with, have the same language or, in many cases, the same religion” ( Society , 77). If divergences in language and religion between different humans serve as the markers for racial difference within the confines of Europe, this passage cannot explain how the operations of race differ constitutively from those of nationalism, to name one obvious example. Foucault, then, moves quite swiftly to explain that races “exist when there are two groups which, although they coexist, have not become mixed because of the differences, dissymmetries, and barriers created by privileges, customs and rights, the distribution of wealth, or the way in which power is exercised” ( Society , 77). Here, Foucault supplies so broad a definition of racism that it could be applied to any number of categories that have been brandished to create caesuras among different humans: economic and social class, nationality, gender, for instance. We are confronted with these resulting questions: How does this definition of race diverge from ethnic racism? Are the racialized classes in ethnic racism not segregated as a result of the distribution of wealth or the deployment of power? Moreover, Foucault does not explain how these groups come to exist as different. How are we to understand the distinction between coexistence and mixing, or what their particular mixing might entail, and so on? Hence, in a fashion similar to Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault positions hybridity as a panacea for racial difference without querying the foundation upon which the idea of racial differences among humans is built. Ultimately, Foucault, despite stressing the importance of racism to the machinations of biopolitics, restrains its full conceptual reverberations, because he relies on a commonsensical notion of racism as his primitive straw man, and because he remains confined to a version of nineteenth-century Europe oddly unscathed by colonialism and ethnic racism. Of course colonial configurations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would at least partially derive from the intramural tensions within and between European nations given that these tensions were exported to the colonies elsewhere around the globe. As a result, colonization unavoidably reflects the racializing assemblages interior to Europe, while techniques that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans developed in the colonies inflect those at home, and which Foucault, following Hannah Arendt, terms the boomerang-effect of colonialism. 17 The fundamental problem, then, is not that Foucault largely omits colonialism and the non-western world from the province of his discussion of racism, but, to be more precise, that he and some of his followers assume there to be substantial inconsistency between a “confrontation of two alien races” and the “bifurcation within Europe’s social fabric,” which demarcates the inadequate and limiting theoretical parameters of Foucault’s conception of racism. 18 Though Foucault does not deploy the term alien races , his insistence on the spatiotemporal disjuncture between the race from “here” and the race that came from “another place” as well as the reemergence of the race from the past within it cannot but echo colonialist tropes and “recapitulation theory”: “The other race is basically not the race that came from elsewhere . . . but . . . it is a race that is permanently, ceaselessly infiltrating the social body. . . . What we see . . . as a binary rift within society is not a clash between two distinct races. It is the splitting of a single race into a superrace and a subrace. To put it a different way, it is the reappearance, within a single race, of the past of that race” ( Society , 61). Within this context, alien races— Ann Stoler’s very unfortunate rephrasing of Foucault’s ethnic racism, to be sure— dodge the brush of discourse, dwelling in a speculative state of organic truth. This line of reasoning rests on the presumptions that such a thing as alien races exist, that the confrontation between them (ethnic racism) need not be explained, and that Europe— remember it is immaterial whether this signifies France or Europe as a whole— was internally cohesive, because racism dwelled elsewhere prior to the ascent of biopolitics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Therefore, in Foucault’s schema race and racism, insofar as they have yet to achieve proper biopolitical credentials, take on the shape of an inevitable clash between unacquainted civilizations. There lies a vast gulf between an argument that explores the particular techniques of racialization which appeared in Europe over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and one that attests to some form of cultural, social, or ontological anteriority of alien races. Put simply, Foucault never interrogates the bare existence of racial difference and those hierarchies fabricated upon this primordial notion and, as a result, reinscribes racial difference as natural. Because ethnic racism is based on preestablished variances among different ethnicities, it evidently demands no further elaboration in Foucault’s genealogical deduction of modern racializing assemblages, and thus emerges as a fixed category rather than as the biopolitical apparatus it actually is. Conversely, the fission that appears within Europe’s autochthonous population in this period assumes the fragmentation of a formerly cohesive body politic: the proliferation of biopower produces the hierarchical differentiation of internal groups as races, whereas the caesuras between European and alien races exist outside the vicissitudes of biopolitics. In Foucault’s model, race and ethnicity remain always already beyond the administrative, ideological, and conceptual precincts of Europe; they function as and in an unnamed elsewhere. 19 The elision and active disavowal of racism , colonization , and ethnic racism in these lectures and beyond become even more pronounced if we bear in mind the unacknowledged influence of the Black Panther Party (BPP) , especially the thinking of George Jackson and Angela Davis, on Foucault’s work in this period. According to Brady Heiner and Joy James, Foucault was familiar with Davis’s and Jackson’s thinking through his affiliation with Groupe d’Infor? mation sur les Prisons, an antiprison group Foucault helped found, and which translated Davis’s and Jackson’s writings and published a pamphlet about the assassination of George Jackson in France. In addition to tracing historical lines between Foucault and the bpp , persuasively showing just how much Foucault’s ideas about incarceration, state racism, and disciplinary power owe to Davis and Jackson, Heiner asks, “Given the formative role that black power plays in Foucault’s elaboration of the concepts of power-knowledge, genealogy and biopower, why is it that the enunciative force of black power is met with social, civil and biological death while that of power-knowledge is subject to canonization in a host of academic disciplines?” 20 The short answer to this important question would insist on the many different ways white supremacy and coloniality still form the glue for the institutional and intellectual disciplinarity of western critical thought. Since the ideas of the BPP are limited to concerns with ethnic racism elsewhere, they do not register as thought qua thought, and can thus be exploited by and elevated to universality only in the hands of European thinkers such as Foucault, albeit without receiving any credit. [Dear reader, if this reminds you of the colonial expropriation of natural resources, you would be neither wrong nor alone in making such an assumption. In the words of Kanye West: that shit cray.] In a trenchant and timely essay, Achille Mbembe offers an extensive contextualization for the many reasons that the history of colonialism and postcolonial studies have made so little impact on French thought since the 1960s. This lacuna represents a marked departure from Sartre’s conversation with Negritude or the relays between surrealism and anticolonialism, to name only a few of the most obvious instances of earlier white French intellectual discussions of these thematics. 21 Though Mbembe writes specifically about France, most western European nations exhibit the same sort of popular cultural and intellectual amnesia regarding (post)coloniality; whither, for instance, coloniality in Jürgen Habermas’s or Antonio Negri’s thinking? Not only does the systematic neglect of race and coloniality as analytic topoi in much of western European critical thought since the 1960s accent the poverty of theory in the European context, it also enables the disavowal of these questions in the U.S. variant of critical theory. Ironically, despite— and most likely because of— the provinciality of post-?1960s French and western European thought with regard to questions of coloniality and race, it continues to enjoy great success in the Anglo-American academy, which, in turn, authorizes the ongoing acts of active disremembering such as Foucault’s. Thus, while French president Fran?ois Hollande may now acknowledge the presence of “Niggas in Paris,” Mbembé offers a more somber and radical diagnosis of this dilemma: “For such a critical thought to have a future at all, we must first turn our backs on that form of anachronism we have come to know as Parisianism.” 22 Perhaps, then, the time has come to bid adieu to Foucault’s metropolitan territoire d’outre-mer . 23TemporalityLinear temporality is a fantasy – Time can’t function on a normative plane because of the functions of white supremacist violence that renders black existence impossibleDillon 13 Stephen; University of Minnesota; Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State; University of Minnesota Conservancy; accessed 8/23/15 In this chapter, I continue to consider time in relation to how radical and revolutionary activists theorized the formation of the neoliberal-carceral state in the 1970s United States. In chapter one, I argued that the neoliberal-carceral state is possessed by the racialized, gendered, and financial logics of chattel-slavery. More specifically, I focused on neoliberalism to argue that the market is a system of dispersed biopolitical control symbiotically enmeshed with the prison and animated by the antiblackness of chattel-slavery. This chapter builds on the concerns of the first by asking, if time does not pass, but accumulates, then what did the future of the prison and neoliberalism look like from the 1970s when both formations were rising to a new level of dominance? In particular, I explore what I call the “temporality of violence.” As I document, racialized and gendered forms of violence undo homogenous conceptions of time. Possession is one temporality of violence where the past takes hold of the present. Yet, possession also has profound implications for the future. When one centers racialized and gendered forms of violence in a theory of history, time does not flow evenly, progressing into a better or unknown future. Instead, violence can slow time, reverse it, loop it, make it stop or rush by in a moment of terror; it can also make it disappear forever. This chapter explores different conceptions of the relationship between time, race, gender, and violence. It examines two contrasting visions of how neoliberalism and the prison were connected to time and the future: I analyze the rhetoric of late 1960s law and order politicians and the epistemologies of 1970s underground revolutionaries.162 Specifically, I examine how a discourse about time and the future was used by proponents of law and order to suture the freedom of the market to the incapacitation of the prison. In addition, I explore how underground revolutionary activists named this process through a non-normative engagement with temporality. While the last chapter considered how the past is theorized in the writings of imprisoned (and at one time underground) revolutionary black women, this chapter analyzes the writings of 1970s imprisoned radicals and underground revolutionaries, most of whom identified as women, in order to examine how they theorized the prison and the market in relation to time and the future. It contrasts these revolutionary visions to the dreams of people like Nixon who understood the prison and the market as foundational to the security and order of the nation and its future. Indeed, for Nixon and others, the very possibility of a future depended on the immobilization of those rendered surplus or resistant to new economic regimes structured around privatization, deindustrialization, deregulation, and financialization. In other words, embedded in the emergent discourses of the neoliberal-carceral state was a vision of the future—one where the freedom of individuality and the market required the mass immobilization of the prison. By contrasting statist and underground forms of knowledge about the prison and market, I argue that underground activists produced a theory of time and history that understood law and order as a way for the prison and market to colonize the future.AnthroAnthropocentric studies personify all humans as the Western Man and presumes equal access to western humanity—yet ignores the alternative versions of humanity that exist and are excluded by the Animal vs. Man categorization as per the 1AC. Weheliye 14We also find this in current studies of posthumanism associated with theories of technological virtuality, as well as in the embryonic field of animal studies. In these modes of inquiry, Man interfaces with a plethora of informational technologies, or in the case of animal studies sheds its superiority complex vis-à-vis nonhuman animals, and enters into the space and time of the posthuman. Moreover, many invocations of posthumanism, whether in antihumanist post-structuralist theorizing or in current considerations of technology and animality, reinscribe the humanist subject (Man) as the personification of the human by insisting that this is the category to be overcome, rarely considering cultural and political formations outside the world of Man that might offer alternative versions of humanity. 18 Moreover, posthumanism and animal studies isomorphically yoke humanity to the limited possessive individualism of Man, because these discourses also presume that we have now entered a stage in human development where all subjects have been granted equal access to western humanity and that this is, indeed, what we all want to overcome. It is remarkable, for instance, how the (not so) dreaded comparison between human and animal slavery is brandished about in the field of animal studies and how black liberation struggles serve as both the positive and negative foil for making a case for the sentience and therefore emancipation of nonhuman beings.19 This sleight of hand comes easy to those critics attempting to achieve animal rights and is frequently articulated comparatively vis-à-vis black subjects’ enslavement in the Americas—“the moral and intellectual jujitsu that yielded the catachresis, person-as-property.”20AltsHabeas ViscusWe affirm Habeas Viscus, a relational assemblage which transforms the hieroglyphics of the flesh into a line of flight, a new type of sumptuous freedom which can interrupt racializing assemblages – whereas dialectically opposing the world of Man only naturalizes its inevitability and conservatizes black studies, our affirmation of freedom in the future anterior tense claims the monstrosity of the flesh in order to instantiate new genres of humanityWeheliye 14Because black cultures have frequently not had access to Man’s language, world, future, or humanity, black studies has developed a set of assemblages through which to perceive and understand a world in which subjection is but one path to humanity, neither its exception nor its idealized sole feature. Yet black studies, if it is to remain critical and oppositional, cannot fall prey to juridical humanity and its concomitant pitfalls, since this only affects change in the domain of the map but not the territory. In order to do so, the hieroglyphics of the flesh should not be conceptualized as just exceptional or radically particular, since this habitually leads to the comparative tabulation of different systems of oppression that then serve as the basis for defining personhood as possession. As Frantz Fanon states: “All forms of exploitation are identical, since they apply to the same ‘object’: man.” 28 Accordingly, humans are exploited as part of the Homo sapiens species for the benefit of other humans, which at the same time yields a surplus version of the human: Man. Man represents the western configuration of the human as synonymous with the heteromasculine, white, propertied, and liberal subject that renders all those who do not conform to these characteristics as exploitable nonhumans, literal legal no-bodies. If we are to affect significant systemic changes, then we must locate at least some of the struggles for justice in the region of humanity as a relational ontological totality (an object of knowledge) that cannot be reduced to either the universal or particular. According to Wynter, this process requires us to recognize the “emancipation from the psychic dictates of our present . . . genre of being human and therefore from ‘the unbearable wrongness of being,’ of desetre, which it imposes upon . . . all non-white peoples, as an imperative function of its enactment as such a mode of being[;] this emancipation had been effected at the level of the map rather than at the level of the territory.” 29 The level of the map encompasses the nominal inclusion of nonwhite subjects in the false universality of western humanity in the wake of radical movements of the 1960s, while the territory Wynter invokes in this context, and in all of her work, is the figure of Man as a racializing assemblage. Wielding this very particular and historically malleable classification is not an uncritical reiteration of the humanist episteme or an insistence on the exceptional particularity of black humanity. Rather, Afro-diasporic cultures provide singular, mutable, and contingent figurations of the human, and thus do not represent mere bids for inclusion in or critiques of the shortcomings of western liberal humanism. The problematic of humanity, however, needs to be highlighted as one of the prime objects of knowledge of black studies, since not doing so will sustain the structures, discourses, and institutions that detain black life and thought within the strictures of particularity so as to facilitate the violent conflation of Man and the human. Otherwise, the general theory of how humanity has been lived, conceptualized, shrieked, hungered into being, and imagined by those subjects violently barred from this domain and touched by the hieroglyphics of the flesh will sink back into the deafening ocean of prelinguistic particularity. This, in turn, will also render apparent that black studies, especially as it is imagined by thinkers such as Spillers and Wynter, is engaged in engendering forms of the human vital to understanding not only black cultures but past, present, and future humanities. As a demonic island, black studies lifts the fog that shrouds the laws of comparison, particularity, and exception to reveal an aquatic outlook “far away from the continent of man.” 30 The poetics and politics that I have been discussing under the heading of habeas viscus or the flesh are concerned not with inclusion in reigning precincts of the status quo but, in Cedric Robinson’s apt phrasing, “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve [and I would add also to reimagine] the collective being, the ontological totality.” 31 Though the laws of Man place the flesh outside the ferocious and ravenous perimeters of the legal body, habeas viscus defies domestication both on the basis of particularized personhood as a result of suffering, as in human rights discourse, and on the grounds of the universalized version of western Man. Rather, habeas viscus points to the terrain of humanity as a relational assemblage exterior to the jurisdiction of law given that the law can bequeath or rescind ownership of the body so that it becomes the property of proper persons but does not possess the authority to nullify the politics and poetics of the flesh found in the traditions of the oppressed. As a way of conceptualizing politics, then, habeas viscus diverges from the discourses and institutions that yoke the flesh to political violence in the modus of deviance. Instead, it translates the hieroglyphics of the flesh into a potentiality in any and all things, an originating leap in the imagining of future anterior freedoms and new genres of humanity. To envisage habeas viscus as a forceful assemblage of humanity entails leaving behind the world of Man and some of its attendant humanist pieties. As opposed to depositing the flesh outside politics, the normal, the human, and so on, we need a better understanding of its varied workings in order to disrobe the cloak of Man, which gives the human a long-overdue extreme makeover; or, in the words of Sylvia Wynter, “the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e. western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.” 32 Claiming and dwelling in the monstrosity of the flesh present some of the weapons in the guerrilla warfare to “secure the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species,” since these liberate from captivity assemblages of life, thought, and politics from the tradition of the oppressed and, as a result, disfigure the centrality of Man as the sign for the human. As an assemblage of humanity, habeas viscus animates the elsewheres of Man and emancipates the true potentiality that rests in those subjects who live behind the veil of the permanent state of exception: freedom; assemblages of freedom that sway to the temporality of new syncopated beginnings for the human beyond the world and continent of Man. German r&b group Glashaus’s track “Bald (und wir sind frei) [Soon (and We Are Free)]” performs this overdetermined idea of freedom as disarticulated from Man both graphically and sonically. Paying tribute to both the nineteenth-century spiritual “We’ll Soon Be Free,” written on the eve of the American Civil War, and Donny Hathaway’s 1973 recording, “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” Glashaus’s title “Bald (und wir sind frei)” enacts the disrupted yet intertwined notions of freedom, temporality, and sociality that I am gesturing to here. 33 In contrast to its predecessors, which are resolutely located in the future via the use of soon / someday and the future tense, Glashaus’s version renders freedom in the present tense, albeit qualified by the imminent future of “bald [soon]” and by the typographical parenthetical enclosure of “(und wir sind frei) [and we are free].” The flow of the parentheses intimates both distance and nearness, ragging the homogeneous, empty future of “soon” with a potential present of a “responsible freedom” (Spillers) and/as sociality. The and and the parentheses are the conduits for bringing-into-relation freedom’s nowtime and its constitutive potential futurity without resolving their tension. The lyrics of “Bald (und wir sind frei)” once again exemplify this complementary strain in that the words in the verses are resolutely future oriented, ending with the invocation of “bald” just before the chorus, which, held in the potential abyss of the present, repeats, “und wir sind frei.” Likewise, in the verses, Glashaus’s singer Cassandra Steen, accompanied only by a grand piano, just about whispers, whereas she opens up to a more mellifluous style of singing in the chorus; as a result, the verses (bald/future) sound constricted and restrictive but only when heard in relation to the expansive spatiality of the chorus (present). What initially looks like a bracketed afterthought on the page punctures the putatively central point in the sonic realm. It is not a vacant, uniform, or universal future that sets in motion liberty but rather the future as it is seen, felt, and heard from the enfleshed parenthetical present of the oppressed, since this group’s now is always already bracketed (held captive and set aside indefinitely) in, if not antithetical to, the world of Man. The domain of habeas viscus represents one significant mechanism by which the world of Man constrains subjects to the parenthetical, while at the same time disavowing this tendency via recourse to the abnormal and/ or inhuman. Heard, seen, tasted, felt, and lived in the ethereal shadows of Man’s world, however, a habeas viscus unearths the freedom that exists within the hieroglyphics of the flesh. For the oppressed the future will have been now, since Man tucks away this group’s present in brackets. Consequently, the future anterior transmutes the simple (parenthetical) present of the dysselected into the nowtime of humanity during which the fleshy hieroglyphics of the oppressed will have actualized the honeyed prophecy of another kind of freedom (which can be imagined but not [yet] described) in the revolutionary apocatastasis of human genres.1000 Tiny RacesThe alternative is to use this gathering to affectively invest in new possibilities for a thousand tiny races.Saldanha 06Every time phenotype makes another machinic connection, there is a stutter. Every time bodies are further entrenched in segregation, however brutal, there needs to be an affective investment of some sort. This is the ruptural moment in which to intervene. Race should not be eliminated, but proliferated, its many energies directed at multiplying racial differences so as to render them joyfully cacophonic. Many in American critical race theory also argue against a utopian transcendence of race, taking from W E B Du Bois and pragmatism a reflexive, sometimes strategically nationalist attitude towards racial embodiment (compare Outlaw, 1996; Shuford, 2001; Winant, 2004). What is needed is an affirmation of race's creativity and virtuality: what race can be. Race need not be about order and oppression, it can be wild, far-from-equilibrium, liberatory. It is not that everyone becomes completely Brownian (or brown!), completely similar, or completely unique. It is just that white supremacism becomes strenuous as many populations start harbouring a similar economic, technological, cultural productivity as whites do now, linking all sorts of bodies with all sorts of wealth and all sorts of ways of life. That is, race exists in its true mode when it is no longer stifled by racism. ``The race-tribe exists only at the level of an oppressed race, and in the name of the oppression it suffers; there is no race but inferior, minoritarian; there is no dominant race; a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race'' (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 379). In ``A thousand tiny sexes'', Grosz (1994b) follows a well-known passage of Deleuze and Guattari to argue for non-Hegelian, indeed protohuman feminism that utilises lines of flight of the gender assemblage to combat heterosexist patriarchy. ``If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes, it is evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a different nature, and that there is a double reciprocal dependency between them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes'' (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 1987, page 213). Similarly, the molecularisation of race would consist in its breaking up into a thousand tiny races. It is from here that cosmopolitanism should start: the pleasure, curiosity, and concern in encountering a multiplicity of corporeal fragments outside of common-sense taxonomies. ``We walk the streets among hundreds of people whose patterns of lips, breasts, and genital organs we divine; they seem to us equivalent and interchangeable. Then something snares our attention: a dimple speckled with freckles on the cheek of a woman; a steel choker around the throat of a man in a business suit; a gold ring in the punctured nipple on the hard chest of a deliveryman; a big raw fist in the delicate hand of a schoolgirl; a live python coiled about the neck of a lean, lanky adolescent with coal-black skin. Signs of clandestine disorder in the uniformed and coded crowds'' (Lingis, 2000, page 142). Machinism against racism builds upon a gradual, fragmented, and shifting sense of corporeal difference, that of course extends far further than the street. Responsibility, activism, and antiracist policy will follow only from feeling and understanding the geographical differentials that exist between many different kinds of bodies: between a Jew and a black soldier, between a woman in the Sahel and a woman in Wall Street, between a Peruvian peasant and a Chinese journalist. A machinic politics of race takes into account the real barriers to mobility and imagination that exist in different places; cosmopolitanism has to be invented, not imposed. It may seem that machinism is as utopian and open ended as Gilroy's transcendent antiracism. It is not, because it is empirical, immanent, and pragmatic. The machinic geography of phenotype shows that racism differs from place to place, and cannot be overcome in any simple way. It shows that white supremacy can subside only by changing the rules of education, or the financial sector, or the arms trade, or the pharmaceutical industry, or whatever. For machinic politics, the cultural studies preoccupations with apology, recognition, politically correct language and reconsiliation, or else cultural hybridity, pastiche, and ambivalence, threaten to stand in the way of really doing something about the global structures of racism. A thousand tiny races can be made only if it is acknowledged that racism is a material, inclusive series of events, a viscous geography which cannot be `signified away'. Miscegenation, openness to strangers, exoticism in art, and experimentations with whiteness can certainly help. But ultimately cosmpolitanism without critique and intervention remains complacent with its own comfortably mobile position. In a word, ethics encompasses politics, and politics starts with convincing people of race's materialityPuarConviviality net benefit to the alt – embracing vulnerabilities creates new fluid relations between bodies. Puar’9 {Jasbir K; Women's and Gender Studies , Rutgers University , Newark, NJ, USA; “Prognosis time: Towards a geopolitics of affect, debility and capacity”; Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory; Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK; Published online: 04 Oct 2010.; ; accessed 31 December 2014, At: 07:02am}AvP Out of the numerous possibilities that ‘‘assemblage theory’’ offers, much of it has already begun to transform queer theory, from Elizabeth Grosz’s crucial re-reading of the relations between bodies and prosthetics (which complicates not only the contours of bodies in relation to forms of bodily discharge, but also complicates the relationships to objects, such as cell phones, cars, wheelchairs, and the distinctions between them as capacity-enabling devices) (1994), to Donna Haraway’s cyborgs (1991), to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘BwO’’ (Bodies without Organs – organs, loosely defined, rearranged against the presumed natural ordering of bodily capacity) (1987). I want to close by foregrounding the analytic power of conviviality that may further complicate how subjects are positioned, underscoring instead more fluid relations between capacity and debility. Conviviality, unlike notions of resistance, oppositionality, subversion or transgression (facets of queer exceptionalism that unwittingly dovetail with modern narratives of progress in modernity), foregrounds categories such as race, gender, and sexuality as events – as encounters – rather than as entities or attributes of the subject. Surrendering certain notions of revolution, identity politics, and social change – the ‘‘big utopian picture’’ that Massumi complicates in the opening epigraph of this essay – conviviality instead always entails an ‘‘experimental step.’’ Why the destabilization of the subject of identity and a turn to affect matters is because affect – as a bodily matter – makes identity politics both possible and yet impossible. In its conventional usage, conviviality means relating to, occupied with, or fond of feasting, drinking, and good company – to be merry, festive, together at a table, with companions and guests, and hence, to live with. As an attribute and function of assembling, however, conviviality does not lead to a politics of the universal or inclusive common, nor an ethics of individuatedness, rather the futurity enabled through the open materiality of bodies as a Place to Meet. We could usefully invoke Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘‘encounter value’’ here, a ‘‘becoming with’’ companionate (and I would also add, incompanionate) species, whereby actors are the products of relating, not pre-formed before the encounter (2008, 16). Conviviality is an ethical orientation that rewrites a Levinasian taking up of the ontology of the Other by arguing that there is no absolute self or other,15 rather bodies that come together and dissipate through intensifications and vulnerabilities, insistently rendering bare the instability of the divisions between capacity-endowed and debility -laden bodies. These encounters are rarely comfortable mergers but rather entail forms of eventness that could potentially unravel oneself but just as quickly be recuperated through a restabilized self, so that the political transformation is invited, as Arun Saldhana writes, through ‘‘letting yourself be destabilized by the radical alterity of the other, in seeing his or her difference not as a threat but as a resource to question your own position in the world’’ (2007, 118). Conviviality is thus open to its own dissolution and self-annihilation and less interested in a mandate to reproduce its terms of creation or sustenance, recognizing that political critique must be open to the possibility that it might disrupt and alter the conditions of its own emergence such that it is no longer needed – an openness to something other than what we might have hoped for. This is my alternative approach to Lee Edelman’s No Future, then, one that is not driven by rejecting the figure of the child as the overdetermined outcome of ‘‘reproductive futurism’’ (2004),16 but rather complicates the very terms of the regeneration of queer critique itself. Thus the challenge before us is how to craft convivial political praxis that does not demand a continual reinvestment in its form and content, its genesis or its outcome, the literalism of its object nor the direction of its drive.The body is a structure – means the affirmative cannot articulate the relationship of individuals to white supremacy – means serial policy failure DA because they always try to explain things via individual but never can explain why things happen – circumvention inevitableIdentitarian formations are forced into grids of intelligibility – our 1NC is a scream of deviance, a destruction of intelligibility, a virus and contagion, a virile infestation, which strikes at the heart of the very meaning of normative intelligible identities – theories of structural positionality collude with the society of control insofar as they capitulate to interpolation, becoming strange bedfellows with demography, census taking, and surveillance. Puar 07There is no entity, no identity, no queer subject or subject to queer, rather queerness coming forth at us from all directions, screaming its defiance, suggesting a move from intersectionality to assemblage, an affective conglomeration that recognizes other contingencies of belonging (melding, fusing, viscosity, bouncing) that might not fall so easily into what is sometimes denoted as reactive community formations-identity politics-by control theorists. The assemblage, a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks, draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and nonorganic forces. For Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are collections of multiplicities: There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object, or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase as the multiplicity grows ).... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions.... There are only lines.21 As opposed to an intersectional model of identity, which presumes that components-race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion-are separable analytics and can thus be disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency.22 Intersectionality demands the knowing, naming, and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the logic of equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative aspects of identification: you become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to consolidate the fiction of a seamless stable identity in every space. Furthermore, the study of intersectional identities often involves taking imbricated identities apart one by one to see how they influence each other, a process that betrays the founding impulse of intersectionality, that identities cannot so easily be cleaved. We can think of intersectionality as a hermeneutic of positionality that seeks to account for locality, specificity, placement, junctions. As a tool of diversity management and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism, intersectionality colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state-census, demography, racial profiling, surveillance-in that "difference" is encased within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid, producing analogies in its wake and engendering what Massumi names "gridlock": a "box[ing] into its site on the culture map." He elaborates: The idea of positionality begins by subtracting movement from the picture. This catches the body in cultural freeze-frame. The point of explanatory departure is a pin-pointing, a zero point of stasis. When positioning of any kind comes a determining first, movement comes a problematic second.... Of course, a body occupying one position on the grid might succeed in making a move to occupy another position.... But this doesn't change the fact that what defines the body is not the movement itself, only its beginnings and endpoints.... There is "displacement," but no transformation; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to the next. ... "The space of the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical [abyss] no-man's land."B Many feminists, new social movement theorists, critical race theorists, and queer studies scholars have argued that social change can occur only through the precise accountability to and for position/ing. But identity is unearthed by Massumi as the complexity of process sacrificed for the "surety" of product. In the stillness of position, bodies actually lose their capacity for movement, for flow, for (social) change. Highlighting the "paradoxes of passage and position," Massumi makes the case for identity appearing as such only in retrospect: a "retrospective ordering" that can only be "working backwards from the movement's end." Again from Massumi: "Gender, race and sexual orientation also emerge and back-form their reality, ... Grids happen. So social and cultural determinations feed back into the process from which they arose. Indeterminacy and determination, change and freeze-framing, go together."24 UC Berkeley TurnTURN – The University is the site of social death—the 1AC only feeds into the militarist war-machine that sustains violence while pacifying resistance – the guise of freedom of speech or the ability to dissent only naturalizes the inevitable cooption of the university which neutralizes any efficacy of counter-hegemonic strategies by pacifying resistance. There is no hope for overcoming the inevitable co-option of oppositional politics. Occupied UC Berkeley 09Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict. Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social death? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss? And in this moment of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear. Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congressmen—even the chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th student strike, shaping the meaning and the force of the movement as a movement against the policies of Sacramento. He expands his institutional authority to encompass the movement. When students begin to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as an autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library money. He manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process. He manages our social death. He looks forward to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to win this or that—he and his look forward to exhausting us. He and his look forward to a reproduction of the logic of representative governance, the release valve of the university plunges us into an abyss where ideas are wisps of ether—that is, meaning is ripped from action. Let’s talk about the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed form: to perpetually deliberate, the endless fleshing-out-of—when we push the boundaries of this form they are quick to reconfigure themselves to contain us: the chancellor’s congratulations, the reopening of the libraries, the managed general assembly—there is no fight against the administration here, only its own extension. Each day passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape student discourse—it happens without pause, we don’t notice nor do we care to. It becomes banal, thoughtless. So much so that we see we are accumulating days: one semester, two, how close to being this or that, how far? This accumulation is our shared history. This accumulation—every once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest, unforgettable fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering heartbreak—is a muted, but desirous life. A dead but restless and desirous life. The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning. As much as capital is invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally invested here in an apparatus for managing social death. Social death is, of course, simply the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility, unity. A ‘life,’ then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted. Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a factory of meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death. A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property). Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands. Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the university—whether Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical space of the university—each one the product of some exploitation—which seek to absorb more of our work, more tuition, more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes. And at this critical juncture the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail to pass the test of ‘relevancy.’ But the ‘irrelevant’ departments also have their place. With their ‘pure’ motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context. As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical potential. And so we attend lecture after lecture about how ‘discourse’ produces ‘subjects,’ ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter. The university gladly permits the precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of commodities. A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational radicalism. And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls. There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth. The university is a graveyard– así es. The graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excluded—the immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their citations. This is our gothic—we are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless. In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard? In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this. We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education! When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a provocation. Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous. Every institution has of course our best interest in mind, so much so that we’re willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts. Each bulging institutional value longing to become more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty gestures of feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed to horror, every moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death. Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning. It’s the positions we thoughtlessly enact. It’s the particular nature of being owned. Social rupture is the initial divorce between the owners and the owned. A social movement is a function of war. War contains the ability to create a new frame, to build a new tension for the agents at play, new dynamics in the battles both for the meaning and the material. When we move without a return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war. It is November 2009. For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies. We need, we desire occupations. We are an antagonistic dead.Alt is Material Add OnThe alternative creates machinic assemblages and coalitions against the state and university apparatus.Cohen and Ramlow 6 Jeffrey J. Cohen, Professor of English and Department Chair at George Washington University, Todd R. Ramlow, women's studies professor at George Washington University, “Pink Vectors of Deleuze: Queer Theory and Inhumanism,” Rhizomes, Issue 11/12, Fall 2005/Spring 2006I owe you lot nothing, nothing more than you owe me. I don't need to join you in your ghettoes, because I've got my own ... We have to counter people who think 'I'm this, I'm that' ... by thinking in strange, fluid, unusual terms: I don't know what I am ... no gay can ever definitively say 'I'm gay.' It's not a question of being this or that sort of human, but of becoming inhuman. [1] [1] The evidence for the queerness of Gilles Deleuze is scant. He collaborated passionately with Félix Guattari, radical psychoanalyst and activist for the rights of gays and lesbians. He shared his work and interpenetrated ideas with Michel Foucault, the founding figure of contemporary queer theory. Yet the philosopher spent his life happily married to his wife, Fanny. They raised two children in what looks to us like the predictable structure of a bourgeois family. He was not even an especially spiffy dresser. [2] Yet we find in Gilles Deleuze's work a provocative reconceptualization of subjecthood and desire, a becoming-queer lucidly evident when he refused the lonely authority of a single voice and hybridized with Guattari and Claire Parnet through writing. This essay explores the trajectories of the queer-in-motion of queer studies and of Deleuze. His greatest challenge to queer theory is something that seems almost recidivist in his work: his animism, his belief that the entire world constitutes a non-anthropomorphic, infinitely connective machinery of desire. There is a capaciousness to Deleuze and Guattari's exuberant conception of sexuality, a boundary-breaking that cannot be reduced to the merely human frame within which queer theory has sometimes allowed its ambit to be circumscribed. [2] We will therefore speak of Deleuze's inhumanism. Throughout his philosophical opus assemblages proliferate by means of which the human disaggregates, scattered across a molecular field of animals, objects, intensities in ceaseless movement. Even in his death, we find, Deleuze refused the weary categories of the merely human and sought some path that might lead away from the sedimentation(s) of decline, sickness, redemption. As the philosopher of middles Deleuze rejected determinative endings, especially when they were used to fix in place and thereby devalue what had been a vagrant and affirmative life. [3] Like one of his favorite classical philosophers, Lucretius, Deleuze discerned in the cosmos movements of desire that intermingle our bodies, our intensities, our particles with the tropisms of the vegetal world, the ardor of stars, the passions of animals, a grand and molecular vitalism. At the farthest side of this process of radical dispersion might lurk death: in Lucretius's case, a ghastly demise borne of plague. To invoke mortality in a discussion of the queer is, we realize, to risk the pernicious linking of the queer to the fatal. [3] This heteronormative conjoining of queer sexuality to morbidity (especially post-AIDS) conceptualizes death as an individualized, judicial event. The queer trajectories we'll follow dismantle the notion of identity that buttresses such a conception, and will (in those famous words of Antonin Artaud that Deleuze loved so much) "have done with the judgment of God," [4] will attempt not to reinscribe mortality back into some reductive system of justice or tragedy. Deleuzian inhumanism opens up the queer to spaces that suddenly cease to stand as final resting places filled only by silence. Pink Paint The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight. (ATP 11) [4] The becoming-world of the Pink Panther might also be understood, in an appropriately deleuzian manner, as the becoming-world of the queer, the becoming-pink of the Panthers and the becoming-panther of the "pinks." Not the Pink Panther originally cited by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, the Blake Edwards-spawned series of fumbling detective movies starring Peter Sellers, bookended by the animated antics of a queer cat. Rather, the Pink Panthers as imagined and produced by the unruly queers of the 1990s. Fed up with homophobic violence in New York and San Francisco, activists coming out of ACT-UP and Queer Nation organized neighborhood watch patrols in the pink ghettoes they'd fought so hard for in order to "take back the streets." The Pink Panthers spread rhizomatically to other metropolitan centers. Multiple becomings, multiple queerings. The Pink Panthers "imitated" nothing, "reproduced" nothing, although the groups did assemble and deploy tactics and identity particles connecting to a variety of minoritarian and urban-based political projects. [5] The Pink Panthers represent one instantiation of what Deleuze and Guattari call the war machine, an assemblage produced in/through/from multiple connections across "smooth space" and time. [5] The war machine proliferates speeds, affects and desiring relations/productions to constitute a line of flight away from the State Apparatus at the same time that it takes that apparatus as object of attack: "It is always the assemblage that constitutes the weapons system" (ATP 399). But the attack and the violence are always secondary. The war machine functions primarily by producing new relationships among bodies, objects and groups in excess of institutional authority or control. The Pink Panthers, as war-machine assembled out of and within multiple minoritarian social and political movements, created novel coalitions and affects across identitarian boundaries that could react, sometimes violently, to institutional violence against queers. The Guardian Angels. The Pink Panthers. The Black Panthers. Black Power. Brown Power. Pink Pride. "Black is Beautiful." "Take Back the Night." "Take Back the Streets." "Out of the Closets and into the Streets." Multiple becomings-minoritarian of queer politics. But for all the paramilitary connotations, including fabulous pink berets, we must not mistake the Pink Panther war machine as a simple extension of patriarchal militarism and the American military-industrial complex. As D&G point out, we must not conceive of this war machine within the logic of the State and institutional power, for "it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere" (ATP, 352). This pink war machine comes out of minoritarian politics, rhizomatics, assemblages, and becomings; otherwise it would be just another army.Means that the entire world operates through war machines and assemblages which means our alternative is the most material because it operates within the way power actually operates – if you win that we are abstract then it means abstraction is inevitable because the entire world is abstract. The way our alt instantiates itself is the most material because it can be used by those in liminal spaces – the Pink Panthers and the Black Panters are ways habeas viscus takes forms which are the most materially accessibleAlt Surveillance Add OnOur alternative allows us to engage in an underground, illegible form of politics outside of the knowledge and control of state surveillance Dillon 13 Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, Stephen Dillon is an assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. law and order, especially in the form of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), systematically dismantled the radical and revolutionary left in the United States (through disinformation, murder, sabotage, incarceration, and exile), a massive network of underground groups emerged in the early 1970s in the place of the 1960s aboveground student, civil rights, and anti-war organizations.233 In order to evade state repression and engage illegal tactics, thousands of activists disappeared into a vast network of safe houses, under-the-table jobs, and transportation channels that kept them hidden in plain sight. One of the main arguments of this dissertation is that these groups contested the emergence of the neoliberal-carceral state. Some of the better-known groups like the Black Liberation Army splintered off from the Black Panthers and other black power groups, while the Weather Underground departed from the student and antiwar movements of the New Left. Still other groups, like the Seattle-based George Jackson Brigade—a group of multi-racial, queer, working class ex-convicts—emerged out of the culture and politics of the era’s anti-prison activism.234 Other underground groups of the period about which much less is known include: Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, the Chicano Liberation Front, Red Guerilla Family, Emiliano Zapata Unit, Iranian Liberation Army, United Freedom Front (or the “Ohio 7”), Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, Nat Turner/John Brown Brigade, and the New World Liberation Front. Many of these groups remain historically obscure because invisibility was their condition of possibility. Underground organizations survived by incessantly erasing the subtle traces every life leaves behind: the detritus of bodies—fingerprints, hair, and skin—but also memories, stories, and documents that could lead to recognition and capture. In this way, a major aspect of their history is what will never be known: what they did, who they were, where and how they lived. In fact, for three years beginning in 1974, the New World Liberation Front committed over 50 bombings in the San Francisco area (including banks, power stations, corporate offices, the San Francisco stock brokerage, and the South African embassy) without injuring one person and without a single member ever being identified or apprehended.235 The underground was a space structured by a politics of unknowing. Indeed, a controlled lack of knowledge— “an endorsement of willful forgetting”—you will know what you need to know when you need to know it, was the condition of possibility for the continuation of the underground.236 This invisibility and illegibility contrasted with the regimes of hypersurveillance, regulation, and policing central to the law and order state As the next chapter explores more fully, the underground is not a place, but rather, is an alternative time-space paradigm, a “parallel universe,” a shadow world that exists within, but negates the normative time of the nation, state, and capital. The underground is a non-place where one hides in the “expectations of others,” fashioning survival along different dimensions that mobilized “timing and synchronization, the thoughtful use of light and shadow, rhythm and pulse.”237 The fugitive became a ghost by disappearing into the openness of the world. New lives and identities were constructed by piecing together fragments collected while on the run: new styles, clothing, voices, histories, and names. David Gilbert, a member of the Weather Underground and later a group associated with the Black Liberation Army, recounts that fugitives had to even learn to walk differently: gait and carriage sometimes were more recognizable than hair or clothing.238 However, “the most essential tool for staying underground was ID.”239 Bill Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground, recounts how political fugitives often scoured rural cemeteries for the graves of dead children: born between 1940 and 1950 and who died five to ten years later. With a name and birth date, they would acquire a birth certificate from the local courthouse and then apply for a social security card that had never been issued.240 They could then get jobs, buy cars, and get bank accounts. The newly disappeared resurfaced as the dead resurrected.241IV Add OnNonviolent strategies of resistance have become hegemonic, taking the anger out of any protest. While the aff tells you to put away your guns, cops shoot another black boy dead. The proper response is outrage, not quiet dissent, because only anger can produce anything threatening to the dominant order.Halberstam 93The eruption of rebellion in the streets of L.A. and its representations in hip hop culture indicate[s]] very clearly that violent law demands violent resistance. Tactics of nonviolent resistance developed in the sixties and used nowadays seem to have become dangerously hegemonic rather than disruptive. In political demonstrations, indeed, outrage often takes a back seat to organized, formal, and decorous shows of disapproval. In San Diego, for example, shortly after the L.A. uprising of spring 1992 in the wake of the Rodney King decision, people filled the streets to sing, give speeches, and march upon the police station. What might have been an outpouring of rage and anger and frustration directed at the racist, violent tactics of the local police was transformed rather quickly into a passive and indifferent meeting. The group of "protesters" actually followed a route laid out for them by a police escort and arrived finally at a deserted police building. After some chanting and shouting, the crowd quietly dispersed. Local newspapers indeed were able to report that in the case of San Diego, the city remained relatively calm in the aftermath of the King verdict.5 The failure of nonviolent resistance to register anything but the most polite disapproval, I suggest, is the effect of a glaring lack of imagination on the part of political organizers, and an overemphasis on "organization" itself, which often produces determined efforts to eradicate expressions of rage or anger from political protest. Such expressions, after all, might lead to something spontaneous, something that spills across the carefully drawn police lines, something threatening.The cultural imaginary governs the self through production of fear; the system has taught us that acting out will get us shot by a cop or thrown in prison. However, we can use the same power of imagination to produce fear in the system.Halberstam 2Postmodernism has been accused of not being political enough but in fact it is political activism that often fails to be postmodern in America in the 1990s. Power and conflict no longer only spring[s] from the domain of politics, and resistance has become as much an effect of popular culture, of videos, films, and novels, as of direct action groups. Postmodernism invites new and different conceptions of violent resistance and its representations. As Michael Taussig writes, we live in a "nervous system," a system characterized as "illusions of order congealed by fear."7 The fear, the order, the nerves are all produced precisely as illusions, fantasies which govern and discipline the self. However, it is also in the realm of fantasy and representation that we make the system nervous, and that we can control and use our illusions. Imagination, in other words, goes both (or many) ways. Thus vote negative to embrace the 1NC’s representations of violently destroying civil society. Imagining violence against the white man disrupts standard narratives of violence that regulate life and creates a productive fear of retaliation. “What you think would happen if every time they kill a black boy, then we kill a cop?”Halberstam 3So, what if we imagine a new violence with a different object; a postmodern terror represented by another "monster" with quite other "victims" in mind? "What if" denotes a potentiality, a possible reality that may only ever exist in the realm of representation but one which creates an "imagined violence" with real consequences and which corresponds only roughly to real violence and its imagined consequences. Recently, queer activism has revived an emphasis on loud and threatening political demonstration, and groups like Queer Nation and ACT UP regularly create havoc with their particular brand of postmodern terror tactics. ACT UP demonstrations, furthermore, regularly marshall renegade art forms to produce protest as an aesthetic object. As Douglas Crimp writes in AIDS DEMO-GRAPHICS: AIDS activist art is grounded in the accumulated knowledge and political analysis of the AIDS crisis produced collectively by the entire movement. The graphics not only reflect that knowledge but actively contribute to its articulation as well.8 Protest in the age of AIDS, in other words, is not separate from representation; and "die-ins," "kiss-ins," posters, slogans, graphics, and queer propaganda create a new form of political response that is sensitive to and exploitive of the blurred boundaries between representations and realities. Meanwhile in the arena of popular representation, in popular film and video, the lines between representation and reality continue to be starkly drawn. Liberals continue to complain about the violent subject matter that especially kids are exposed to on TV and in cinema. But, I suggest, represented violence takes many forms and some still have the power to produce change. Conventional TV and movie violence, of course, consists of violence perpetrated by powerful white men usually against women or people of color. Such violence is a standard feature of the action genre, of the rock video, of almost every popular form of entertainment, and to a degree it is so expected that audiences may even be immune to it. On the other hand, violence against white men perpetrated by women or people of color disrupts the logic of represented violence so thoroughly that (at least for a while) the emergence of such unsanctioned violence has an unpredictable power. In recent years, popular texts that prominently feature violence against white men have been thoroughly analyzed by the popular media. So, for example, Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise created an unprecedented wave of discussions around the issue of violence and women.9 Suddenly, violence, and particularly female revenge fantasy violence, was tagged as "immoral," "extravagant," "excessive," or simply "toxic feminism."10 Debates raged about whether we really want to condone a kind of role reversal that now pits female aggressors against male victims. But role reversal never simply replicates the terms of an equation. The depiction of women committing acts of violence against men does not simply use "male" tactics of aggression for other ends; in fact, female violence [it] transforms the symbolic function of the feminine within popular narratives and it simultaneously challenges the hegemonic insistence upon the linking of might and right under the sign of masculinity. Women with guns confronting rapists has the potential to intervene in popular imaginings of violence and gender by resisting the moral imperative to not fight violence with violence. Films like Thelma and Louise suggest, therefore, not that we all pick up guns, but that we allow ourselves to imagine the possibilities of fighting violence with violence. Women, in other words, long identified as victims rather than perpetrators of violence, have much to gain from new and different configurations of violence, terror, and fantasy. Within the "nervous system" women are taught to fear certain spaces and certain individuals because they threaten rape: how do we produce a fear of retaliation in the rapist? Thelma and Louise is an example of imagined violence that produces or may produce an unrealistic (given how few women carry and use guns) fear in potential rapists that their victims are armed and dangerous. Of course, there is no direct and simple relationship between imagined violence and real effects: just as it is impossible to judge the ways in which pornographic representation interacts with male sexual violence, it would only restabilize the relationship between the imagined and the real to claim that representing female violence quells male attacks. The "place of rage" where expression threatens to become action is of course that tightly patrolled and highly ambiguous space that we call "fantasy." The power of fantasy in the realm of erotic desire has been theorized variously by feminist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern critics. In feminist theory, for example, fantasy constitutes a problematic site for various contests over representation and politics-the pornography debates have posed the question of whether rape and violence against women are in part produced by the objectifying dynamics of pornographic fantasy. Such questions about the relationship between desire and representation have proven to be unanswerable since this relationship is constantly being refigured. In an essay titled "The Force of Fantasy," however, Judith Butler proposes that we rethink the relationship between the "real" and fantasy by refusing to grant the "real" an a priori stability. She suggests that the "real" is "a variable construction which is always and only determined in relation to its constitutive outside: fantasy, the unthinkable, the unreal."1' What happens when we make imagined violence-as opposed to erotic fantasy-the object of critical scrutiny? What is at stake in this question is the way that sexual fantasies might or might not intersect with violent fantasies to force into visibility the constructed nature of the real. If imagining violent women does nothing else for example, it might shift the responsibility for articulating the relationship between fantasy and reality from women to men. In other words, power lies in the luxury of not needing to know in advance what the relationship is between representations of violence or sexuality and acted violence or sexuality. The burden of stabilizing this relationship in the arena of sexuality has for too long fallen to women and to feminism and has, of course, produced unproductive alliances between antipornography feminists and the religious Right. Texts like Thelma and Louise create anxiety about fantasy and reality in a very different group of spectators. "Imagined violence" is obviously an adaptation of Benedict Anderson's well-known conception of the nation as "an imagined political community."12 Anderson explains that "communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined." While nationalism, like national identity, is one of the most powerful effects of imagining community, there are many other identities that are mobilized by the power of fantasy. Furthermore, imagined communities allow for powerful interventions: they allow for the transformation of imagined fear into imagined violence. One example of such a transformation is the Queer Nation/Pink Panthers slogan "Bash Back." In response to homophobic violence, this group mobilized around the menace of retaliation. In an essay on "Queer Nationality," Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman explain the affectivity of this strategy: "Bash Back" simply intends to mobilize the threat gay bashers use so effectively-strength not in numbers but in the presence of a few bodies who represent the potential for widespread violence-against the bashers themselves. In this way, the slogan turns the bodies of the Pink Panthers into a psychic counter threat, expanding their protective shield beyond the confines of their physical "beat."13 The power of the slogan, in other words, is its ability to represent a violence that need not ever be actualized. There is no "real" violence necessary here, only the threat of real violence. The violence of Queer Nation in this example is the moment when what Foucault calls the "reverse discourse" becomes something else, something more than simply "homosexuality beginning to talk on its own behalf."14 The reverse discourse gathers steam, acquires density until it is in excess of the category it purports to articulate. The excess is the disruption of identity and the violence of power and the power of representation; it is dis-integrational; the excess is QUEER. Imagined violence disintegrates the power of what Audre Lorde calls "the mythic norm"15 and what David Wojnarowicz describes as the "ONE TRIBE NATION." It challenges, in other words, hegemonic definition and even the definition of hegemony itself. In Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, Wojnarowicz writes about being queer in the age of AIDS: "We're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called america and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I am amazed that we're not running amok in the streets" (108). Wojnarowicz writes of murderous desires and desires for murder; he calls for bloody and violent change and he does so in what he calls "the language of disintegration." For Wojnarowicz, language itself becomes a weapon, a tool, and a technology and the act of imagination becomes a violent act. In Wojnarowicz's essays, he imagines a violence generated by HIV+ bodies and transforms the AIDS-stricken body into a symbol of postmodern politics. The Person With AIDS, the junkie, the homeless person, the queer in America have the power, as Wojnarowicz says, "to wake you up and welcome you to your bad dream" (82), or the power to completely and utterly alter the contours of the real and to reshape them into realized nightmares. Wojnarowicz's "memoir of disintegration" counters the slow decline of the body with speed, physical and mental speed. Life speeds up as time winds down and the car traveling across an open landscape becomes a symbol for Wojnarowicz of desire without an object and of a kind of masturbatory pleasure in self-propulsion or auto-mobility. The automobile here signifies precisely the movement of the self, the multiplicity of the self as it disintegrates within the realm of the bodily and proliferates in the realm of fantasy. Fantasy, the safest sex of all, avoids physical contamination but it contaminates nonetheless. It contaminates by making information viral; information, in other words, is transmitted via images which enter language and mutate. "Americans can't deal with death unless they own it" (35), says Wojnarowicz in reference to a museum of the atomic bomb. Death, in this memoir, is stasis, the banality of arriving at one's destination; it is a full stop, an end to language and speed. Wojnarowicz's heroes with AIDS attempt therefore to stave off death with technology, writing, or photography. In one scene, the hero films his friend's dead body-here the video camera, like the King tape, like the Ice-T song, records a dangerous technovision of reality in the making. The "real" now is precisely a reel of tape, a memory that can be cut, edited, replayed, rewound, paused, or fast-forwarded. "There is no enlarged or glittering new view of the nature of things or existence," writes Wojnarowicz. "No god or angels brushing my eyelids with their wings. Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head" (28-29). Wojnarowicz's language of disintegration, his effort to rewind or fastforward the real, destroys the America he calls the ONE TRIBE NATION and transforms it into the many tribes. Of course, the political tactics of ACT UP have involved the disintegration of discrete identities into the many identities united in coalition against the "virus which has no morals." The ONE TRIBE NATION, Wojnarowicz shows us, is a particularly powerful imagined community, but it is one that cannot withstand the impact of a disease which, in the geography of its transmissions, maps out the limits of identity, the murderous effects of inadequate health care systems, the ideological investments of medical institutions, and the breakdown of even the unity of the Right. This transformation can be capitalized on through imagining a violence that shatters the complacency that prevents people from immediate and spontaneous revolution. "I'm amazed," writes Wojnarowicz, "that we are not running amok in the streets." Here Wojnarowicz echoes June Jordan's poem titled "Poem about My Rights": "We are the wrong people/of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what/in the hell is everybody being so reasonable about."16 Wojnarowicz's answer to his frustration at what he sees as a passive nonresponse to the totalitarianism of the ONE TRIBE NATION is to imagine: I'm beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for the radical gesture is the imagination. At least in my ungoverned imagination I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire.... (120) Hell is a place on earth and heaven is a place in your head and I too believe that "one of the last frontiers left for the radical gesture is the imagination." I believe that it is by imagining violence that we can harness the force of fantasy and transform it into productive fear. Wojnarowicz's memoir participates in AIDS activism because it confronts the Jesse Helms of America with the possibility of violent retaliation; it threatens precisely in its potentiality. It is with the potential for violent response from the so-called other that June Jordan ends her poem: "I am not wrong: wrong is not my name/My name is my own my own my own/and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this/but i can tell you that from now on my resistance/my simple and daily and nightly self-determination/may very well cost you your life." This is the return of the gaze in cinematic terms, the threat of the return of the repressed, an always bloody and violent re-entry into the realm of signification. This is the articulation that smashes binarism by refusing the role of peaceful activism and demands to be heard as the voice that will violate-the damage, again, lies in the threat rather than in any specific action. My resistance may cost you your life; my answer may silence your question; my entry into representation may erase your control over how I am represented. ................
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